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For many of us, our computer has become a critical part of our life. We use them for working, entertainment and corresponding with people we know. Over the course of time, most people create a number of files that are important to them and would cost time, money or both if they were lost. Data backups are the most effective way to make sure you won’t lose those important files.

Many people think of backups as something large companies or computer geeks do. Or they might plan on doing it when the get the chance. Every one of those people has either already lost data due to some kind of problem with their system or they will one day. Every piece of computer equipment has a lifespan and is going to fail one day or another.

On that day, one of two things will happen. You’ll either suffer the grief that comes with losing financial information, passwords, music collections, personal photographs and all the software you’ve purchased. Or, you can repair or replace the computer and restore from the backups you’ve been making regularly. The latter is an annoyance, the first a disaster.

There are, unfortunately, an infinite variety of ways to lose data. Besides hardware failure, computers can be destroyed in fires or floods. Hard drives can be damaged by power surges caused by lightning strikes or data lost by a child randomly hitting the keyboard. Viruses can infect systems and erase hard drives.

But there’s only one way to get it back - by having it available to be restored.

What to Backup?

In most cases you don’t need to backup every single thing on your computer. It can take a lot of storage space, and take a long time to complete the backup. The critical files to backup are all the things you have created, such as word processing documents, digital photos and spreadsheets, and any software you can’t reinstall from the original CD or DVD.

The list can go on and on, but the backup doesn’t need to.

The easiest way to do backups is to use the backup software that comes with the operating system. Windows has a free, usable backup program while similar ones are available for Mac, Linux and others. The software is easy to use and backing up is a simple matter of selecting which folders to backup. It even has a scheduler so backups can be automated to occur at convenient times.

If you want something a little more powerful, there are a number of backup program you can purchase. These programs offer features such as only backing up files that have changed since the last backup, or those that have changed since a particular date.

Some types of data are a little more difficult to backup. Email is a good example. Some email programs don’t actually store the messages on your computer - they’re stored on the server instead. In these cases, you can usually export the messages into a file on your computer that can then be backed up.

You can backup your information to almost any kind of removable media - removable hard drives, writable CDs or DVDs or even the USB memory sticks that are so common these days. In a pinch you may even be able to fall back on the old floppy disk. Documents don’t take a lot of space and often fit into a small storage area.

Running a daily backup may seem like one more thing to accomplish in your already busy day, but the first time you lose a file that you need and don’t have saved, you’re going to wish you made the time.