I back up my critical data every day to three different websites.

The rest of my data, like photos and music, I backup regularly to two external hard drives in my office. I have three other external hard drives stashed at other people's houses.

For the last ten years, the program I use to backup my data is called Handybackup, which you can get from Handybackup.net.

On November 6, 2009 Handybackup stopped working. I reported the problem to the russians and they have been giving me fixes, none of which worked.

In the meantime, I have been backed up only some of my data by hand. I meant to do more, but time goes fast.

Last weekend I got an error I would not wish on my worse enemy, "read seek failure on drive". All my data was gone and none of the dozen recovery programs could find a single file.

I suspect Handybackup did not work because there were errors on the drive.

Let that be a warning to you. Automate your backup. Backup daily. If your automated program breaks, be suspicious. You need to backup more frequently, not less.

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg