4 – Thou shall backup regularly and externally. Purchase an external hard drive and cd/dvd-r’s

Let's face it, computers crash and die regularly. The unfortunate side effect of this is that this could mean that all of your data (pictures, resumes, financial info, documents) can be wiped out with a single hardware failure.

Fortunately, this is very easily mitigated by backing up regularly and on an external device (flash drive, external hard drive, cd/dvd-rom, online storage service). Another way to mitigate failure is to configure your desktop with multiple hard drives, and use a RAID (redundant array of independant disks) controller and "mirror" (data is written to both drives simultaneously and if one drive days, your data stays intact) your drives. If you only have one drive, you can partition your hard drive with one partition for windows, and another for your data:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000 - How to manage disks and create partitions

Here's a quick run down of external storage devices and where to get them:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148356 - External 1 TB (1000 gigabytes - his device could store about 1000 or so movies) - $118

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233042 - 16 GB Flash drive - $36

http://online-storage-service-review.toptenreviews.com/ - Online Storage Services - on average $5/month for at least 5 Gigabytes of storage

Given all of the options (most of them very cost effective), there should be no reason for anyone to loose any data!