I don't know how many times I have told people this, but here I go again...you MUST, MUST, MUST maintain a backup of your hard drive. No matter if you are just a home hobbyist or you plan to take over the free world from your Mac, you have to protect yourself. Nevertheless, even though I stress this advice to everyone I know with a computer, only a handful are smart enough to do backups.

  Why do you need to do backups? Well...I'm glad you asked. Let's begin with the least destructive possibility, you yourself. Yup! You can actually make a backup worth its weight in gold with just one bonehead move. Let's say you are editing a picture in Photoshop that was already saved under the filename "A." You need to keep "A" as it was, but you also need to create the same photo with a caption and save it as "B." So you finish the caption and hit the menu bar's SAVE option. Oops! Forgot to do SAVE AS... now your original file is no more! You only have the photo with the caption on it. You're stuck unless you have a backup (or an undelete program which is far less likely to be successful in getting your file back). You can also bonehead yourself by just erasing a file you later realize you need. Well with both these mistakes, a backup is a two second solution instead of hours of frustration.

  Why else should you backup? What if the computer crashes in the middle of your work and corrupts you Quicken (personal finance program) data? You just lost five years of financial records bonehead! What will you do? You'll recover from the backup you made just a few days ago if you were smart enough to (what's the word here class?) BACKUP! There are thousands of examples like this. Tiny little quirks of the Macintosh, power failures at the wrong time, devilish init conflict...they all are excellent reasons to backup.

  Now onto computer Hell 101. Let's go beyond the minor file-based mishaps and go onto larger problems. Let's say you just downloaded a file from your favorite BBS and run the file only to realize it has a virus in it. Off the teeny bug goes infecting everything it can attach to. You are most likely going to lose a good amount of your personal data...unless you didn't pull another bonehead move and remembered to backup. This same multi-file loss can occur with corrupt directories and trashed boot blocks. Both of these computer cronies can occur far more often than you think. If it hasn't happened to you already, consider yourself lucky!

  You've graduated to Computer Hell 401. Congratulations bonehead! You left your hard drive alone so it could scheme against you. It thinks, "Hmmm...no backup? This is the perfect time for me to smoke a motor, crash my heads, or smoke a diode!" These things are not beyond the scope of reality. Hardware does fail...especially hardware with mechanical parts. Your drive is now fried. You're screwed big time. You have NOTHING left. What are you going to do now? Maybe six or seven years of work, databases, phone numbers, Tetris high scores, everything GONE. Oh sure, you think, I could try one of those recovery programs. Nope! If your hard drive has a hardware problem you are sh*t out of luck. The drive will most likely be in a landfill by morning. That means all the work you have done will literally be in the trash. Maybe that backup would come in handy now BONEHEAD!

  I don't mean to be mean. I don't want to call you names...but nothing else seems to work. I have spent many countless nights consoling a friend or computer client who went from 4 gigs to "byte me" in 0.3 seconds. They had no recourse. Don't let this be you! Fight the power of Murphy's Law, backup now!

  Yes, I agree backup drives, tapes, or whatever media you choose to use are an added expense to computing. It may even be a hardship on your wallet; however, a ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of almost cure. Let me explain.

  A particularly bad case happened recently to a client of mine. She had a huge multi-thousand dollar project on the line for Monday morning and guess what happened Friday afternoon. Her drive started screaming louder than the baby next door, which, of course, led her to cry louder than the baby next door. She called me and explained her predicament. "When was your last backup?" I asked. I had made her promise to me on each client visit prior that she'd do weekly backups. "About two months ago, I think, when you last did it for me," was the bonehead response. I felt sick. I felt bad. But the reality was that her drive's motor bearings were dead and along with it went all of her very time-consuming, delicate, personal data. Gone in a flash.

  Her drive was an older 360 meg unit...not much in today's vast expanse of storage platters, but still it was 360 megs of lost gold. We called a specialist, DriveSavers. This is effectively the last stop-gap gas station on the hard drive highway. They have clean rooms, weird test tubes, guys that speak binary as their primary language, you know ultra-geeks! They politely told her what it would cost her IF, that's IF, they got her data back...a whopping $1200. Are you kidding me? In her case $200 for another 360 meg drive and a backup program would have saved her $1200 and about 36 hours of sleep, not to mention that lost multi-thousand dollar project. Again, I felt sick for her. What a bonehead!

  I, on the other hand, just last week, had a drive go bad with a minor hardware problem called "sticktion." Most likely, I would have eventually lost all the data on the drive, but luckily I had backed up just that morning. I simply removed the offending drive, shipped it back for a FREE replacement (under the 5 year warrantee) and three days later restored my new drive using a program called DiskFit. It took about an hour, cost nothing, and saved me days of calling myself bonehead.