Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine who works in the computer business. He mentioned to me about a customer he had come in to his store with a computer badly neglected and in a state where it would be hard to do anything with it. It was infected with viruses, spyware and malware and needed major servicing. Unfortunately he discovered that the hard drive was damaged and no useful data could be retrieved from it. He mentioned to me that the customer was very annoyed and upset about this as he said he had photos, documents and some work he had been preparing for someone on that disk. My friend felt bad for the guy but what I thought was a bit much was that this customer almost felt it was the technician fault his PC had let him down and kept on ranting about all he lost. It got me wondering about how many of you reading this have a backup plan in operation?. What about those documents, photos, music and other items you have on your hard drive?, are they the only copies you have of your materials or are you playing it smart and have taken steps to backup your stuff onto an external hard drive, USB memory stick, CD, DVD etc?. It's no good complaining about all you have lost when the PC goes down. It's no use blaming someone who is trying to help and you then turn your frustration on them if something can't be retrieved. Take a bit of time now to think about your materials. Are they the sort of items that can't be replaced?, if so put a backup plan into action and keep those files safe. Backup at least once a week and then you can be assured that everything is safe whenever that crash comes, because it's not "if" it comes but "when" it comes!. Let us know here on the list some of your ideas so we can share them with others. Cheers, Paul. _____ I am using the Free version of SPAMfighter <http://www.spamfighter.com/len> . We are a community of 7 million users fighting spam. SPAMfighter has removed 3032 of my spam emails to date. The Professional version does not have this message. ******************************************************************** National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) is a company limited by guarantee (registered in Ireland No. 26293) . Our registered office is at Whitworth Road, Drumcondra, Dublin 9. NCBI is also a registered Charity (chy4626). NOTICE: The information contained in this email and any attachments is confidential and may be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient you should not use, disclose, distribute or copy any of the content of it or of any attachment; you are requested to notify the sender immediately of your receipt of the email and then to delete it and any attachments from your system. NCBI endeavours to ensure that emails and any attachments generated by its staff are free from viruses or other contaminants. However, it cannot accept any responsibility for any such which are transmitted. We therefore recommend you scan all attachments. Please note that the statements and views expressed in this email and any attachments are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NCBI ********************************************************************