The wonderful thing about digital media is that it is so easy to copy and share. Sending photos, videos, or any sort of file around the world is as simple as a few clicks (much to the chagrin of the music industry). The same reason it’s so great is a reason it’s also dangerous. It is just as easy to delete or lose a file as it is to make a thousand copies.

I like to take a lot of pictures. Vacations and gatherings are all well documented in my photos directory which has grown substantially since I got my first digital camera in 2002. Not only did I still maintain the habit of printing pictures regularly for frames and photo albums, I also burned ALL my pictures to a CD or DVD every few months. If I ever got a new computer, server, or harddrive, I would copy the entire contents of my photo directory and My Documents to that new storage space. For some reason, I’ve always been terrified to lose my pictures, let alone any files that might be useful or important.

On any given day, my laptop could explode and I wouldn’t worry too much about losing files, because I know I’ve got other copies of 90% of the information on that drive. It used to be difficult to back up constantly. There were tape drives, stacks of empty CDs, then DVDs. While they were generally good for backing up files, what if your photo directory was bigger than you could fit on a CD or DVD (Mine is currently 14.5 GB and has more than 11,000 photos).

These days, however, storage is cheap. Not only can you get a 8 GB USB Memory stick for less than $20, portable USB/Firewire hard drives are also becoming very cheap. I bought a 500 GB portable hard drive last week for $89. The first thing I did when I got it home was copy all my photos to that drive. Its only purpose is to be a backup drive for anything useful.

Do yourself a favour. Since life is already filled with enough stressful things, don’t let a fried drive and a few thousand lost files ruin your day. Make backing up your information a habit. Keep copies of your eggs in a few different baskets. That way, hardware failure, a nasty virus, or carelessness won’t leave you saying “If only I had made another copy!”

The cost of a backup drive and the sense to build backing up into your weekly/monthly routine is pretty minimal compared to the benefits and the relief you’ll get should you ever actually require it.