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I've had a home computer since 1981 ... and Apple ][+ that is still the most expensive computer I ever owned. They charged $50 for an extra chip to enable "lower case" -- oooh, ahh! Hard drives? You're kidding, right? The first hard drives for pre-Macintosh computers were 5 MB ... yes, megabytes ... and they wanted around $5,000 for them. But, hey! the 160 KB ... yes, kilobytes ... one sided 5" floppy disk drives ran $750 but you could save money by using a whole punch to make a hole in the floppy square on the other side so you could record on "side b".
So far -- and many computers and O/Ses later -- I have yet to experience a catastrophic failure. And I have not been a religiously anal backup person either.
It's why I love the most recent solution: Rebit for Windows, for around $30; works with Windows 7 and earlier OSes; and is being relaunched as "SaveMe". It stores a backup of your entire system to a dedicated external drive (I have 1 TB) ... in real time. Yes, that Word doc or Excel spreadsheet you've had open for 45 min is backed up. If the entire computer died, the Rebit external drive can be used to regenerate on a fresh computer .. exactly where you left off. It stores multiple versions of files, based on available space and all are accessible with a click or two.
To be doubly sure, I buy a new drive about once a year and start over, putting the old drive safely away in a drawer. A TB these days runs about CDN$120 ... a few cents a day. Between genealogy files, pictures, music files, e-mail and now e-books, the peace of mind I get is ... priceless.
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