One of Dad's buddies called me in a panic this morning. His computer went pppffft with a complete hard drive failure. He has no backups because it was something he was alwasy "going to get around to one of these days".
Five years of data. Five years. With no electronic backup. And no paper printouts. And it's tax time.
He's, um... tense.
I told him he might be able to use a data recovery service, but that it would be horrendously expensive. It's that or try and get copies of all his banking records so he can begin rebuilding his data. He's a pretty big operator for one person (family farm/ranch) so it's going to be a long haul either way. Multiple accounts, dozens of vendors, payroll, investments, etc. Not good.
In other words, back up your data. Often. And keep both a copy of the data AND a paper printout somewhere offsite just in case the worst happens. It may take a while to burn a DVD of your data, but it's nothing compared to the time, headache, and expense of trying to recover from a complete crash.
I keep all my data in one folder on my drive, including copies of my e-mail, address book, and internet Favorites. I back that folder up at least once a week. It saved my bacon a few years ago when I had a drive go down. It took me a little over a day to get the machine back up and running, what with the drivers installs, updates, and little piddly crap associated with continuing to run Windows ME. But once up and running it was less than 20 minutes to have every stitch of my data completely restored.
Brad