This again is another very popular subject that I get asked about. People spend months collecting Photgraphs sometimes Years, put them all on their computers, and then when the computer breaks they loose everything !!!

The first thing to remeber is Partition your Hard Drives. If you think about a 200gb Hard Drive as being 1 BIG house, and in that house you have everything, all your Windows files, and all your Photographs and files. If there was a problem in the Big House and there was a fire, it would be quite likely that everything would get destroyed. Were as if the one BIG house of 200gb was made into 4 smaller house of 50gb they would all be nice houses, and if a fire started in 1, hopefully it wouldn't destroy the others.

This is like a computer, 90% of problems on a PC happen on the 'Windows' drive, this is the main part of the hard drive that has all the important windows files on it. Then when something goes wrong with this part of the drive it collapses everything. What you should do is have all your important files on a seperate partition, so that when something happens to the Windows area, you still have all your files safe.

The next stage is to buy an External Hard Drive. These cost about £40-£50, and they enable you to have an additional Hard Drive that connects to your PC via a USB. Then Periodically you should copy all your folders onto the External Hard Drive. This should then provide a good backup solution. The time between backups depends upon how much your data changes.