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Back in the days when I made backups of individual files on floppy diskettes, I had learned what I called Murphy’s Law of Backups. This was: “You will always need one more backup copy than you have.” This taught me the importance of backing up my computer.

Sometimes that rule applied to backing up a drive onto a bunch of diskettes and running out of diskettes. Other times, it applied to actually using the backup diskette itself, instead of copying the data to the hard drive and then using the file. This was the guaranteed way to make the same dumb mistake with the backup copy ;).

In today’s world, there is one tool on which I rely for backing up individual files, and that’s Karen Kenworthy’s Replicator program. At my house, it backs up the data files that are on my notebook, my desktop, and my wife’s desktop to different machines. Most of these end up on my Linux computer that functions as a file backup site and a web development platform.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got your data scattered in folders all over your hard drive, or all stored in My Documents. Either way, if you haven’t backed up your data, you’re rolling the dice.

As a friend says, “there are two types of hard drives — those that have failed and those that haven’t failed yet.”

Read more in Backing Up My Data