If you were like me, then you always mean to "get around to it", but "around" somehow never comes.

That was until one weekend and my hard drive failed, taking a very important project with it. Since the project was due that Monday, I frantically searched for the last backup to recover it.

Much to my dismay, the backup was over a week old and I had done at least 20 hours of work on it since then.

I spent the next 24 hours typing and redoing all that work!

Since then I have been very careful to make backups as often as possible. You should make a backup schedule and stick with it.

Naturally daily backups are the best but backups done on Monday-Wednesday-Friday are also good.

For business purposes, backups done only once a week just aren't frequent enough. Think back over this last week and all the work you have done. Now just imagine trying to recreate all that by hand if you hard drive fails.

An excellent backup program is Acronis True Image, which can make an "image" of your entire hard drive. This allows you to be able to restore your operating system as well as your data to a new hard drive if you have to.

Another program that I have used to good effect is SyncBackSE. SyncBackSE not only backs up your data but will synchronize it as well. This is very handy when you trying to maintain documents and files between say a desktop computer user, a laptop user and remote office person carrying things home on a USB.

I would recommend you get both. Either one would be more than adequate for a small or home office, but with both you truly have all your backup bases covered.