If you only make one new year pledge with your IT, make it to keep everything important backed up whether in the cloud using dropbox or opencloud or an external hard drive.
It really is very important
Yet again today I had to help a friend who had lost eveything due to a hard disk failure. It was business work as well, which will cost him a lot of money to reproduce. Just stop and think how it would affect you tomorrow if that happened on your computer.
The thing to always remember is that every device that makes up your computer is born with a thing called an MTBF - Mean Time between failure.
It's basically the manufacturers idea of when that component will die. They are normally measured in years, but those years can pass very quickly. If you have a machine that is over three years old, then some of the components in it will be coming up to their MTBF.
The device that holds all your letters,pictures,music,documents,spreadsheets is the one that has the shortest MTBF, and is very often the one that will fail first, your hard disk. It is an electro mechanical device, and they fail, often. I work in a world where we have massive storage arrays, with thousands of disks all working flat out everyday, and they fail all the time, let me assure you.
So the moral of this little diatribe is to get you to think about backing your important data up at least once a week. To prove I carry out what I preach, I have just done this laptop, with the built in Ubuntu backup util called Deja Dup. On the Mac you have Timemachine, and I'm sure Windows will have something or you can download something easily.
Once you have started backing up your data, always make sure you test what you have backed up and least once every couple of months, just to be sure you are backing up good information.
Go on start today, and just think how smug you will feel if anything does happen ;-)