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Performing data backups is a lot like buying life insurance: You hope that you never have to use it, but if disaster strikes you are so much better off because you followed through on it.

While many people find reasons not to perform backups, data backups are the center piece of a computer defense strategy, no matter if the defense is set against viruses, trojan horse programs, hackers, malicious software ("malware), or hardware failures.

A virus or Trojan Horse program trashed your machine? Restore your system from a backup and you are back in business once again.

A hacker penetrates your computer defenses and goofs with your system in such a way that you do not know what they did or what they left behind? No problem! Pull out your backup and restore your system.

Malicious software launching your web browser at random intervals and pointing it to rated X sites? If the malware proves to be resistant to your attempts to remove it using ad-ware removal software, you can always restore your system from a backup that you made.

Hard disk failure keeping you from booting your computer or accessing your data? Once again, it is the handy data backup to the rescue (once you have replaced your hard disk).

So with all of these benefits, why do people fail to make backups? Most likely because they think that backups are a real pain to make and maintain.

While keeping a recent backup of your data DOES take some effort, the fact is that there are many backup strategies available, and there is undoubtedly one that will work for you.

For example, if you want to be able to be up and running as quickly as possible after a data loss, you can make an entire image of your hard drive and store it in a safe place. If disaster strikes, you simply restore the entire hard disk image and your computer is returned to the state it was in at the point in time when the backup was made. This method is nice in that it does not take much time to restore your entire system (relatively speaking), but you do have to store the ENTIRE contents of your hard drive as part of the backup. This takes a non-trivial amount of time and also chews up a lot of storage space, especially as you make multiple backups. However, the arrival of affordable external hard drives with sizes as large as one terabyte of storage space (that is one million gigabytes!) is making this option more attractive all the time.

But for those who wish to keep backups that use less space and require less time to create, you can backup ONLY your data, rather than the entire drive. The down side to this, of course, is that in the event of a data loss, you have to manually reinstall your operating system and all of your applications before you can restore your data and resume working. You have to decide for yourself if this option works for you.

There are many other backup strategies that you can employ. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses with respect to the amount of time required to create the backup, the amount of time required to restore the backup in the event of a loss, the amount of space required to hold the backup, and the amount of human intervention required to make or restore a backup. The trick then is to assess your needs and come up with a backup strategy that balances these strengths and weaknesses in a manner that makes sense for you.