Backing up data is something that many seldom remember to do, but it is one of the most important things we as computer users should do frequently.

Recently, my wife managed to grab her laptop before it fell off the side of the couch. The shock of her hand hitting the case went straight to the hard disk, and suddenly it was full of bad sectors. When it came out of standby, it was freezing constantly. And when we restarted it, it wouldn’t even try to load.

Luckily, I had backed the photographs up in January. However, it is now June. That’s several months of photographs lost. Right now I am copying the drive’s contents to another hard disk, in 3 days it has progressed 12%. It may take the whole month to recover the data.

Moral of the story: If you ever drop your laptop, or do anything to it that isn’t kind, let it be a prompt to back up your data. Yes it will take a few, but an hour plugged into an external hard drive beats 30 days of trying to recover valuable data that might be forever ruined.