Do you back up your computer? If not, start.

I feel like, for some reason, we don't get the importance  of backing up until our hard drive fails and we realize we just lost everything. When my hard drive failed in December, I was incredibly lucky and they were able to easily recover my data. My mom's hard drive failed over a year ago, and getting her data back was not so easy. I don't remember how much she had to pay for data recovery services, but I know it was more than $1000, maybe even $2000. You could buy a nice bag with that money! I never even thought to back up my computer before these incidents.

Although I would hope that all of you are already regularly backing up your computer, I'm sure that's there's a few of you who don't! Here are two relatively cheap, easy external hard drives that you can use for your backups: Iomega 320GB Portable Hard Drive, apple.com, $79.95 and the Iomega 500GB Portable Hard Drive, apple.com, $119.95. I have two Iomega external hard drives and they work wonderfully and look great with my Macbook Pro! They will also work with PCs. I want to clarify that I'm not an expert on external hard drives, and I'm not saying that these are the best ones available. However, I've had a good experience with them, and they're also very easy to transport. If you're in college, definitely get a portable one instead of a desktop one. You want to bring your external hard drive with you back and forth from home to school, because you never know what can happen. When mine died in December, I was at home. There were signs that my hard drive was failing, but where were my two external hard drives? At school. Lesson learned.

Here's a link to more external hard drives available on Amazon.com if you want to shop around a bit. 

If you don't back up your computer, PLEASE START! There's nothing worse than losing all of your documents (pictures, homework, etc) and then needing to reinstall EVERYTHING!