It's amazing how easily - and quickly - everything can go wrong on a computer. And no matter how much you beg or plead, if your computer crashes and you lose your hard-drive data you may never get any of it back. Technology is unyielding like that.
Perhaps a short story will illustrate the importance of data backup. I was recently forced by my family into installing security software provided by our ISP. "It's only free for a short time," they insisted, "and we need the protection." I'd been quite content with the free Norton service we'd been getting from them, and it didn't LOOK as though it was coming to an end, but I went ahead and installed the software anyway.
It was, for starters, annoying. Whenever I tried to open anything it would consider the item a security risk. This includes perfectly normal programs as well as net-based applications trying to connect to the Internet. Soon, though, the program was doing things of its own initiative, actually declaring perfectly good programs to be Spyware and removing them from my machine. MIRC is not Spyware, last I checked.
This all came to a head when, as I was watching a movie and thinking about going to bed, my computer turned itself on. That was certainly a new one, and when I came over to inspect it - not a little spooked was I - I discovered that it was in a loop at the Windows XP loading screen. A trouble shooting screen saying I'd not turned the computer off properly beforehand (lies) would pop up, offer a variety of actions I could perform, start booting up Windows and then restart the whole shebang from the beginning. I did what I could with what I had, but given that I couldn't even get into Windows that was very little.
So I was faced with only one option, from my limited technical vantage point: do a system restore. Hunting down the boot discs for Windows and slid the first one into the CD drive and waited for the system restore to pop up. When it did it offered two options: format the hard-drive and start from scratch or backup all the data and get a clean copy of Windows going, sans problems. Naturally I chose the latter. I made SURE to choose the latter, and the computer went ahead with my request.
And deleted everything. Without warning, no less. My hard-drive was wiped clean, destroying years upon years of stuff I'd collected. I'd backed up my work-related items, but the rest? The pictures and letters and documents and so forth? Gone. All vanished in the blink of an eye.
Create a backup for your computer. Like all other tragedies in life, system problems strike without warning and can be utterly disastrous. Be prepared and you'll be far less regretful overall.