There is an old saying, If it aint broke dont fix it, many people subscribe to this philosophy with their computers. If they can turn their computer on and access their email or play a game, then preparing for an eventual disaster is usually the last thing on their minds.

If you use your computer for business or store important files like family pictures or tax records, it is imperative that you formulate a plan to backup your computer on a regular basis. Even if your computer is brand new, or just a few months old, hard drives can fail, power surges and lightening strikes happen, and viruses or malware can wipe out your data at a moments notice.

Recently, the main hard drive failed in one of the computers I manage for a busy Real Estate office. They had a backup plan in place, but they failed to routinely follow it. The latest backup data on the external drive was over a year old. They lost hundreds of contacts and thousands of dollars in labor spent building data bases and specialized software files.

I restored all the old data I could and immediately instituted a regular backup schedule that they have been following religiously. They were not worried about a catastrophic data failure because they had installed new hard drives in their computers just over a year ago. But hard rives are very delicate and complex, and one never knows when there may be a failure.

So how do you go about setting up and following a proper computer backup plan? Here are my suggestions:

1. Get Some Form of External Storage Capability. Windows XP has a built in restore feature, but that is worthless if you have a catastrophic hard drive failure. To be truly effective, your computer backups must be stored outside of your computer. You can do this by writing the data to CDROMS or DVDs, but this is a rather slow and cumbersome method. There are online services which allow you to store your data on their secure servers, but the upload times can be really slow, even with broad band.

I recommend getting a large capacity external hard drive, preferably with USB 2 or FireWire capability. Buy the largest capacity drive you can afford, a minimum of 120 Gigabytes. Now if your main hard drive fails, you will have a current mirror image of the drive you can restore using a special boot disk created by your backup software.

2. Buy a Computer Backup Program and Use it. There are a lot of software solutions out there, Norton Ghost is probably the most well known. For various reasons I wont get into in this article, I dont recommend Ghost as your primary backup software. I have tried many different backup programs and the one I use most frequently is Arconis True Image. Regardless of what program you choose, learn to use it effectively, develop a computer backup plan and stick to it.

You may want to backup once a week, every other day or even daily if you are constantly adding new and important data. I perform an incremental backup of each computer every five days. This gives us recent enough data files to work off of should we experience another failure. Whatever schedule you choose, stick to it, no excuses.

3. Create a boot disk and know how to use it. The most recent backup in the world is useless if you are unable to restore it. If your hard drive fails, you must be able to restore your backup data to your new drive or computer. To do this you will need a bootable CD or a set of bootable floppy disks to restore your backup image. Each program does this a bit differently, be sure to read the manual and fully understand the process.

By following the Best Practices I listed above, your data will be safe from eventual loss. Hard drive failure will no longer be a major catastrophe, if you have a proper backup plan in place you can be up and running in a matter of hours.