It's one of those things that quote "Won't happen to me".  It may, it may not, however I found myself in the position last weekend of starring at a freshly formatted laptop that once contained pretty much my entire computerized life.  Without a working backup, gigabytes of photos, music, and worst of all Web and creative work were all missing from the folders that I saw them last.  Luckily I listened in class when my instructors all told me make backups often... or wait... I guess I slept through that part of class.

I am now about 20 GB's leaner on my freshly formatted Vista laptop.  Photos, at least those not on Flickr, Facebook, etc are gone, 7 years of Web development work are gone as well, and the only good news out of the whole thing is that my music I was able to rescue off of my IPod. 

It's been a while since I wrote a post in the developer gear series mainly because most of the tools I have been using I have been using for a while, or they have been around for a while themselves.  Experience tends to be the source that I draw my writing from, and this post is no different.  My failures in adhering to one of the most basic principles of computers left me with massive amounts of data that I spent hours trying unsuccessfully to recover.

Over the next several weeks I will be investing in a external hard drive as well as a back up software solution.  It's almost like shopping for car insurance; there really isn't anything sexy about it, but it has to be done.

This post isn't necessarily to provide ideas or suggestions on what tools to use (those will come as I make my selections), but this is more of a warning to those who are a lazy, naïve, or let's just face it... stupid as me not to be backing up their critical data.