Odds are you have hundreds of gigabytes of personal data stored on your home computer including movies, music, games, documents, and photos and unless you are taking the right precautions these files could all be at risk. Data is stored on hard drives and unfortunately these spinning disks are far from perfect, it doesn't take very much to cause a complete failure and often times older hard drives will fail without any warning or trigger. When this happens all of your important personal data will be lost for good, unless you were smart and made a backup.

Backup up data is simple and usually can be automated but in the long run it will save you some serious headaches. Even if you think that the data on your computer isn't necessarily that important you will be surprised just how much it hurts to lose everything. Whether you lose everything due to a software corruption issue, a hardware failure, or some other issue; a backup will definitely be able to get you back on track without having to recreate every bit of your hard drive.

If you want to start being proactive with your computer health then now is the time to create an efficient and reliable backup plan. Obviously you will not want to store your backups on the same hard drive as the original files so an external drive might be a good option. As long as you get a hard drive with enough storage you can easily back up every single piece of your system with ease. Many of these external hard drives even come with automatic backup software which can and will handle the backup process without any input from you whatsoever. This is the best alternative as far as simplicity goes but of course there are hundreds of other programs out there that are either free, or relatively inexpensive that can do the exact same thing.

Once you have a backup system in place it is time to create a schedule or plan. This is where automatic backups really help because they won't require any input from you. If you insist on manually backing up data then you need to pick certain days or weeks to do the backup so that you have frequently updated backup files. A 6 month old backup file is going to be of little help should something fail so the more frequently you back up your files the better your chances are of preventing any sort of major failure. Backups should not be optional for any computer user because failures do happen. If you are properly prepared then there will be absolutely nothing to worry about if and when a hard drive does eventually decide to fail on your.