Imagine losing all your music, photos, CV, letters, Bank Details, Passwords and addresses.

In the pre-digital world this would take a catastrophy or a super thorough thief! In this digital age this can happen any morning that you turn your computer on and you're faced with the Blue Screen.....

Last year I dropped my laptop, more accurately I threw my laptop to prove my undying love to my partner and suitably regretted it the next day..... My hard drive was permanently damaged with a none too convincing rattle, I lost two years of photos, my CV, all my contacts and all of my music, in effect I felt that I'd lost an entire two years of my life.

We all do it We all now increasingly rely on computers to store the most important things in our lives, but hard drives are relatively fragile parts of the computer, spinning at thousands of revolutions a minutes. Even if you care and love your computer and handle it will kid gloves it will eventually wear out, with no warning prior, the average life span is between 3 and 5 years.

What can you do? BACK UP.... the simplist way and the way I backup, is to burn all your information to CD or DVD, most home computers have these built in, alternatively you can buy these from around £30. The other alternative depending on the size of your music collection (each CD is roughy 140 mp3's) you could look at external hard drives.

Too late? If its happened to you, access how important the information is and find a specialist company that will be able to extract information from the most abused hard drive, click for data recovery companies.