AVOID A DISASTER--BACK UP YOUR DATA

Today's computers are far more reliable than yesteryear's. But hard drives still crash. And when they do, they take your data with them.

That's when people wring their hands and say, "Golly, I wish I had backed up my stuff." Or perhaps stronger words to that effect.

You don't have to suffer a hard drive crash to need a backup. Sometimes we delete a file we needed. Or an important file becomes corrupted and won't open. When those things happen, a backup allows you to go back a few days or weeks and retrieve a good copy of the file.

When you back up, copy the files that you created. In a disaster, those will be irreplaceable. Your operating system and programs can be reinstalled from your discs.

Where do you back up to? Really careful people copy information to a removable medium, such as a CD or ZIP disk. Then they remove it from the premises. If the building burns, their data is safe.

You could back up to a CD-RW, an external hard drive or any other type of removable media. Traditionally, backups have been done to tape drives. But they are expensive, and their size hasn't kept up with hard drives. To make backups easy, I keep all my data under My Documents in Windows Explorer. Then I just copy that folder and everything in it.

Windows has backup software. But on most Windows versions, you have to install it. Windows does not install it automatically. Don't ask me why.