Backing up your PC is not only essential for your sanity but it comes with a shadowed warning: most hard drives are dead in 3-5 years. That’s right; you wondered why you’ve seen the prices fall through the ceiling on desktop and laptop computers these last years and that’s it! People are running through their machines in faster fashion than ever; if you thought your good old reliable computer you bought a few years ago would last forever, you’ll be pleased to dispel that myth. All the information on your computer may be gone the next time you turn on (or “off” if you’re reading this on your machine now!) your computer. Then what would you do? Life would most certainly go on, but really, how devastated would you be? These are the questions we all must ask ourselves as we push on through the day and take our computer, our information, and by some extension our lives for granted.

Maybe if you don’t have anything of use on your computer; if you just play Spider Solitaire and only do online functions where you use the same password every time and all your information is saved on your websites; maybe then it wouldn’t matter so much. I mean, you’d have to get a new computer but it wouldn’t be very devastating.

However for the rest of the world, we keep things on our computers. Things that mean something; things that we’d rather not have lost; just gone up in smoke with never a possibility of return.

Now I know that it can seem like a cumbersome event for you to have to do a backup. And the chances are you’re not going to do your backup right before your computer crashes. Ideally we’d all get new machines before our old ones died; or we’d at least have prepared ourselves adequately, so that the loss of our operating system wouldn’t be so devastating.

If you’ve got some backup software then it’s the kind of thing that can backup your machine automatically without your having to think about it so that in the event of a devastating crash you’re protected since the time of your last backup.

Full PC backup can be a lot more time consuming but if you’ve got a good automatic PC backup program you may be okay.

PC backup is one of the devilish necessities of our 21st century lifestyle. Maybe this century we’ll invent something that will make us less dependent on our machines. Until then…