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Data Security
Why back up?
Whether your computer is a budget model or the latest and greatest, it is probably not as valuable to you as your data. Unfortunately most people don't realise this until that data becomes unavailable.
Business or personal. Those precious photos and memories, that password list, the club newsletter, your CV, the company accounts for the last five years...
Data can be lost in a number of ways; virus attack, hardware failure, file system corruption, accidental or intentional deletion.
Your data is stored on a mechanical hard disk - a rotating set of platters and a read/write head attached to an arm which travels across the surface of the disk. This is housed within a metal box within your PC. And being a mechanical device, like a car, it can break down.
If I can tell you nothing else about your PC I can promise you that at some point YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL FAIL. Hard disk reliability is measured in terms of MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures. This means that even the manufacturers realise that their drives WILL fail at some point. And laptops are generally more likely to suffer disk failure than desktops or towers.
There are some simple and relatively inexpensive steps you can take to ensure that you don't lose your data should one of these happen to you.
What do I back up?
The minimum that you want to back up is probably your data. This includes documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, music, videos and email. All of the 'stuff' that you have created and accumulated, some of it purchased, much of it priceless.
You may want to include things like your Internet favourites, your application settings, desktop wallpaper, screensavers. This information is stored in your user profile.
If the computer is used by more than one person, perhaps with a different Windows 'user' set up for each then you may want to back them all up together.
You might want to go a step further and make a backup of the entire hard disk. This way you get all data for all users, plus your Windows installation and all of your applications and settings; the 'belt and braces' approach.
You should also keep physical copies of all installations disks, set up disks and serial numbers for the software that you use.