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After coming back from vacation my 3 year old, self-built PC that I use as my primary home workstation threw a little fit. It turned out that my main hard drive that holds the OS and installed applications had died. Luckily my anal retentive backup policy paid off. It was a pain in the butt to install XP on a new disk, apply all patches, install all my security utilities, applications, internal and peripheral drivers and software but the net result is that after a few hours work my PC is back up and running without loosing a scrap of data or a single photo.

It is not a question of if your hard drive will ever die, it is just a question of when it will occur. If you take photography even vaguely seriously and your PC is your darkroom and repository don't take any chances; backup your photos often. I am so glad that I did. The freeware version of SyncBack has now saved my ass both at work and at home. When used in conjunction with a large external hard drive or two it's a great freebie that provides simple but effective backups and piece of mind. This is the first time I've had a PC die and have not been worried about my data; I knew everything was safe. That made the inevitable a whole lot less stressful.