Remember, it’s not if, but when in terms of hard drive crashes. My new Dell computer is an ideal example - new, high tech, etc. And the hard drive died in less than 2 months. Dell immediately shipped a replacement. Fortunately, I use Retrospect for daily complete backups. Once the replacement hard drive was in place, I merely re-installed Retrospect and restored my entire system. It took about 3 hours to recreate the index of files, and about an hour to restore my system. But every program, every document and setting were there, as if I just turned the computer on from the day before. I sighed a huge sigh of relief. So, if you aren’t backing up daily — and with the cheap cost of online backups and/or external hard drives, you should be — you are merely waiting for the crash. It may not happen today, but someday…

 In other words, back up everything all the time. I couldn’t be happier I did.