The threat of data loss exists with almost every click of your mouse. Life in the online world can be dangerous. Smart businesses will do whatever is required to minimize that risk.

Have you ever lost all of the data on a floppy disk and had to redo an entire afternoon's work? Perhaps you have rendered a music or game CD unusable because of a tiny scratch? Maybe you have experienced a full fledged hard drive meltdown that resulted in gigabytes of lost data and months, even YEARS of lost effort.

The "worst case scenario" happened to me a few years ago. I received a call from a friend informing me that my home had been broken into and the burglars had not only stolen the electronics in the living room but had also taken the house's PCs. I learned the hard way that data backup is something that every computer user who has important data on their hard drive cannot live without. Whether you simply purchase an external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire, or sign up for offsite secure data backup, make sure you take steps to guarantee that your data is safe and sound, even if the worst happens to your computer hardware.

It doesn't hit you right away when you no longer have access to your data. The first things that come to mind are the expensive hardware that went into building your machine. Maybe you had a nice flat panel monitor or a state of the art video card for playing the latest games. While it can be very disappointing to lose expensive tech goodies like these it is still no comparison to losing those zeros and ones etched into every user's hard drive. Hardware can nearly always be replaced, even at no cost to you if you have insurance, but lost data is gone forever. There is no way to recover data that you have not backed up if you lose the original media it was stored on.

In my case, I was not using offsite secure data backup, or any kind of backup for that matter. My backup was about six months old and sitting on a tape drive in my closet. When those thieves walked off with my machine they left with not only an excellent gaming platform but also my entire web design portfolio, numerous customized versions of my resume, THOUSANDS of MP3 files that I had ripped from CDs (many of which I had lost the original CD for), Microsoft Money files, and thousands of digital photographs that are impossible to replace.

Take a moment and think about all the important digital files you have on your computer and ask yourself if it is worth investing a little of your time and money in an online remote backup solution to make sure that data is available for you for a lifetime.

Your DATA is your LIFE. Protect it!