A few weeks ago I had my computer break down. Of course I panicked because I was in the middle of a bunch of work, but I could breath a little sigh of relief because I did have a backup of my working hard drive and data drives. It is still a little disconcerting to be without the computer.
I brought the computer to the shop and it was checked out. The hard drive was fine, but the main board was going to need to be replaced, but due to the age (it just turned "vintage" to Apple's standards) It was not going to be economical to repair. I found a place that had a rebuilt of my laptop for a reasonable price and purchased it. THANK GOD! I did the hard drive swap and I was in business.... No problems. I am glad that the hard drive was good and ready to go for the transplant, but if it had bit the dust, I would at least have my backup hard drive.
I thought that this was a good time to write a Blog post to give others a head up about the dangers of loosing years maybe decades of research. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA! You will want to have back ups of all your genealogy data and this is not just limited to electonic copies. Make copies of any paper records you have and if possible, store those paper copies in another place other than where you have your "originals", I always print out 2 copies of paperwork related to my client work.