Summary Virtual It’s important to make backup copies of everything you value on your computer – your financial records, important documents, your music and, especially, your photos.

It’s important to make backup copies of everything you value on your computer – your financial records, important documents, your music and, especially, your photos. Why do we emphasize photos? Because photos are the irreplaceable records of your life. They are your memories of your family, friends, special occasions, travel, vacations and more. Once they’re gone, you can’t bring them back. So back them up, before it’s too late.

What is back up? Very simply, it means copying the data on your computer disk drive onto other storage media – CD, DVD, Flash drive, another hard drive, tape drive, or online storage – that is external to your computer. Why is back up necessary? Because computer disk drives can crash or fail, and when they do, your data can be lost. How likely is that to happen? According to a recent study by Google, 1 in 12 disk drives fail within two years. That number doesn’t include drives that have failed after experiencing a non-technical disaster, such as having coffee spilled into them. It also doesn’t include the disk drive crashes caused by operating system or application software glitches, or malfunctions caused by viruses or Internet worms. Those crashes don’t necessarily cause the drive to fail, but they can erase or ruin some or all of the data on the drive.

Most people have heard of back up, but most people don’t back up until they experience a disk drive crash or failure that wipes out their data. Count me among those people. As a professional writer, I have backed up my work files and my financial records for years, but I didn’t back up my personal photo library because I thought photos would take up too much space on my back up hard drive and I’d never experienced a drive failure. Until then. I lost the photos of my son’s birthday, my daughter’s ballet performance, a holiday celebration, and a family vacation in Paris. I was devastated. Following a $1,500 bill from a data recovery service, I got many but not all of them restored. For a small fraction of that cost, I could have backed them up.

Back up is easy. Just copy your photos onto other storage media. While back up is easy to do, it’s hard to remember and it’s even harder to manage and restore. That’s why we recommend using inexpensive backup software, such as Symantec’s Norton® Save & Restore, which automatically makes regular backups for you. It also walks you through the initial backup process, even recommending the best place to store your backups. And should you lose anything you’ve backed up, it will automatically restore your files, including your precious memories.

Popular back up media include:

If you’ve never experienced a disk drive failure or even a serious crash, consider yourself lucky. Before your luck runs out, however, we strongly recommend that you back up your precious photos. Backing up is easy to do – and it’s relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to your memories, which are priceless.

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Back It Up Now!