Are you regularly backing up the hard drive on your PC? It has been said that there are two kinds of people ... those who have had a hard disk crash and those who will. I'll tell you some easy ways to protect your data.
And I present my qualifications by saying that I have experience with data storage and backup. And you know the definition of experience right? Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted!
Let me begin by saying that I have used many different kinds of backup devices over the years. I have used cassette tapes, floppy disks, tape cartridges, disk cartridges, writable CDs, writable DVDs, and external drives. And I still recommend some form of this kind of backup today. For today's high-capacity disk drives, you can't go wrong by backing up, at the least, your critical data on some external media. Because even if you don't use your PC to store sensitive personal or financial data, there are still configuration settings for your PC you may not want to lose.
Now you can buy hardware and software that automatically starts backups and cycles backup media in and out of the backup device as necessary. But that tends to be pricy and best left to servers. I'll leave that topic for another time.
If your system has a drive that supports writable CDs or DVDs you can manually backup your hard drive on this type of media. Writable CDs and DVDs can hold from 650 megabytes (MB) up to 4 gigabtyes (GB) and more of data. Your CD or DVD writer probably came with software that lets you drag copies of data from the hard drive to the CD or DVD drive folder. Or it may even include some automatic backup software. One disadvantage of CDs and even DVDs is that hard drives today typically won't fit on one of these. With hard drives in the range of 10-200GB are common. And it's not unusual to see 250GB drives now. Another disadvantage is the write speed. Even with high-speed CD or DVD writers it can take a long while.
Another option is an external disk drive. Large sizes are available which makes it possible to backup your entire hard drive in many cases. And the hard disk drives are very fast. You can copy an entire drive quickly.
However many people find it difficult to make data backups on a regular schedule. I'm a people! I mean I'm a person and I just can't seem to make the time for backing up my data.
So I'll tell you what I do. I use mirrors! Not smoke and mirrors ... just mirrors. In my machine I have two hard disk drives ... not to double my storage capacity, but to provide a continuous backup of my hard drive. Every time my computer writes to the disk drive, it actually writes the same data to two different disk drives. They are a mirror image of one another. Most Windows computers since Windows NT have had this capability.
The first, and most painful part, is to get two hard drives in your system. I usually buy my computers that way, but I have added hard drives later. It's not exorbitantly expensive though. Hard drives, even large hard drives, are reasonably priced these days. It's usually best to have the two hard drives the same size (or you waste space in some form). And I like to have the drives from the same manufacturer (but maybe I'm just anal). I say painful, because you, or someone will have to open up your PC and put a second drive in if doesn't already have one. If you don't feel qualified to do this, check with your nearest PC store. Most will do it for you, for a fee, or for free if you buy the hard disk there. They may even perform the next step which is to set up the mirror.
After that, you go to the Control Panel, select Administrative Tools, then select Computer Management, then click on Disk Management. You right-click on the existing or "old" volume and select "Add Mirror", then right-click on the new disk that will host the mirror and select "Add Mirror". This will establish a mirror and initially copy the data from the "old" drive to the "new" mirror. Thereafter, the data is automatically written to both drives when changes or updates occur. You can also view the status of your mirrored volumes to make sure the mirrors are healthy and all your data is backed up. On Windows systems you may not see the options for mirrors until you have a new unused drive in your system on which you can create a mirror. There are detailed instructions for your version of Windows on Microsoft's site.