Financial records
	Accounting data
	Customer data
	Contacts
	Letters and documents
	Photos
	Email
	Projects
	Books in progress
	Databases
	Notes and ToDo lists
	Appointments
	Spreadsheets
	Tax info

	Use surge surpressor or better yet,
	Get a battery backup system (UPS);  Avoids power failures and related disk crashes

UPS Links

American Power Conversion (APS) - http://www.apcc.com/index.cfm

Tripp Lite (UPS)- http://www.tripplite.com/

How much Back-up Power do I need? - http://www.tripplite.com/sizing/index.html

	Avoid moving your system around; never move when it’s turned on
	Don’t let unauthorized, unskilled, or unknown people access your system (they could intentionally or accidentally delete things)
	Periodic antivirus checks

Antivirus Links

McAfee - http://www.mcafee.com/

Norton Antivirus - http://www.symantec.com/nav/index.html

Dr. Solomon Anti-Virus Toolkit - http://www.drsolomon.com/home/home.cfm

Note that some data from some crashed hard disks can be recovered, usually at great trouble/expense.

Data Recovery Links

Lot's of them, see Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Computers/Services/Data_Recovery/

Data only: just periodically copy the important files to floppies or removable disks, or even a second hard disk (chances are low that BOTH hard disks will fail together).

Total system backups: all hard disk files are backed up to floppy (yuk), removable storage, or tape.

Total system backups are rarely as useful as you think – often, programs have to be reinstalled anyway when a disk is replaced.

	Floppies; rare for system backups; usually for storing small individual files as they are created.
	Removable drives: Jaz, Zip, Syquest, Bernoulli, MO, CD-R/RW
	Often overlooked: a large additional hard disk; having data on two drive "spindles" is much safer than just one
	Tape drives: common and pretty cheap; fairly fast to backup; fairly slow to restore.
	Online storage: companies that provide storage areas on their sites; better for smaller collections of highly critical data you need stored off-site fairly frequently.

Online Storage

AtBackup - http://www.atbackup.com/

Atriva - http://www.atriva.com/

	Floppy disks (1.44M usually)
	Zip
	Jaz
	Syquest
	Tape (QIC, DLT, DAT)
	Online storage

Places to buy hardware and media

PC Connection - http://www.pcconnection.com/

Micro Warehouse - http://www.warehouse.com/microwarehouse/

	Windows95/98 and NT include a "free" backup utility, usually can write to floppy, hard disk, removable disk, or (some) tape drives
	Many third party solutions: Seagate Backup, Novaback, Cheyenne. Some software will "compress" data to as much as double the space on your backup media
	You could use compression programs (like Zip, Winzip or Stuffit) to save space on floppies or storage media.
	Some utilities can back up critical system files (registry, etc.). Examples are Norton Utilities, Nuts and Bolts, etc.

Backup Software

Seagate - http://www.seagatesoftware.com/homepage/

Novastor - http://www.novastor.com/

Compression Utilities

Winzip - http://www.winzip.com/

Pkware - http://www.pkware.com/

System Utilities -

Nuts and Bolts - http://www.mcafee.com/products/nuts_bolts/nnb.asp

Norton Utilities - http://www.symantec.com/nu/index.html

	Backup early and often. Even if you save your work every hour, you could still lose an hour’s worth of work!
	Daily backup at least of important work
	Could backup only important stuff
	Could do regular backups of entire areas without regard to what’s changed
	Rotate your backup media so you have several versions of backed up files.
	Always store a copy of your critical backups "off-site" (so if your home or business is destroyed you have some version of the info)