Your hard disk will crash. Count on it. It happens to everyone eventually. And when it does you will be glad you have a backup copy of all your data. Today Lucas McGregor, CTO of Xdrive, will teach you how to back up your hard drive on "Call for Help."

You do have an up-to-date backup, don't you? You don't? Never fear. Here are the simple rules of data recovery for people who hate to back up.

Back up and take it with you
I strongly recommend using some form of removable media for your backup. You could purchase a second hard drive or create a special partition on your current hard drive. Keep in mind that backing up to a separate partition on the same hard drive isn't going to be recoverable if your hard drive crashes. If you can't take it with you, it's not a backup. I know a famous author who lost an entire novel because her backups were stored next to the computer when her house burned to the ground.

You can back up to floppy disks if you have no other choice, but floppies aren't reliable for long-term archival storage. And filling dozens of floppies is so time-consuming, most people will put off backing up until it's too late.

Many users want to emulate businesses and back up to tape drives. Tapes are cheap, and their huge capacities make it easy to back up an entire hard drive. But I don't like tape backups because you're never sure if the data is really there.

I prefer to have long-term archival storage of my data such as CD-R or DVD-R. If you need to store more, you'll need more than one disc. Since each CD stores 650-700MB, I can back up all my data monthly for very little cost. CD storage is compact, compatible with nearly every PC on the market, and likely to last for several decades at least. Most backup programs will back up to CD-R. I recommend Dantz's Retrospect or Retrospect Express.

DVDs hold 4.7GB, considerably more, so you may want to consider buying a DVD burner for your backups. Recordable CDs and DVDs are as close as you can get to backup nirvana.

CD-RWs (CD rewritables) present another alternative to storing your backups. CD-RWs cost a little bit more per media than CD-Rs but are well worth it. CD-RWs allow you the option of dragging and dropping directly to the disc just like you would when copying files to a floppy disc.

Older removable storage mediums such as Iomega's Zip or Imation's SuperDisk are suitable if you already have the required drive. These disks hold 100-250MB or 120-240MB respectively -- plenty of space to back up all your irreplaceable data. Best of all, your data is stored on the disk normally, so it's easy to verify that the copy actually took. Your money is better spent on a burner if you don't already own a Zip or SuperDisk drive.

I use a simple shareware program called Second Copy to automatically back up my data every few hours to a Zip disk in my machine. But this is an old practice I've engaged in for ages. I have three disks I rotate daily, taking the most recent to work with me. This way I always have three copies of my data, one of which is offsite in case of a major disaster.