Originally Posted By: XS650
Don't get me wrong, SpinRite is useful, but first things first.
+1
I tell everyone who is within earshot and unable to flee that your computer is itself most likely a cheaply made, expendable piece of garbage. The data you keep *in* your computer is what is of value, and some considerable portion of your computing budget should, in my opinion, be apportioned to securing and backing up the valuable part.
I keep a USB drive with my main drive mirrored on it off of my property, powered down, backed up once per week; and I keep really important stuff on an Amazon S3 account "in the cloud". It breaks my heart when folks lose their family photos and movies and documents because their system was compromised or their hardware failed. That data is gone forever and it doesn't need to be that way. The beauty of digital information is that you can make a bazillion copies of it without generational degradation. DVD's are a few cents each - Make multiple copies multiple times per year of all of your data and store them hither and thither, even.