I looked at Tiger Direct, where I have happily shopped before, but saved $10 by shopping around and trying a new vendor,Directron. E-commerce is business “Darwinism on steroids”… indeed.

I found a great deal on a new Toshiba Travelstar 100GB – 5400RPM – 8MB cache. As of this writing, I have had it for a week. So far, so good. But only the paranoid survive, so please, regularly defragment your hard drive, run an occasional check disk (for errors) and back up your data weekly.

Hard drives are moving parts… they fail. Its worth the money and time. So, I also bought a cheap little external drive enclosure for $10. Good enough to use for the purposes of backups and archiving. If I was going to use it every day, I would have spent more money on the enclosure. But enough about the hardware.

If you want to backup your data, you could just drag the files from one drive to another. But why copy files that haven’t changed? That is the beauty of backup software. Even a simple little product like Microsoft’s Sync Toyknows whether a file has changed and thus, if it needs to be copied over to the backup set.

However, simple little tools like Sync Toy, are not slick enough to copy the Operating System files. So, while you may have a safe copy of that important document, you will have to spend days re-installing Windows XP or whatever your OS. Unless of course, you use a product like Norton Ghost, which I will discuss further in another post.

I will write more about Backup software and its principles in another posting but for now be forewarned. One day it will happen to you, either prepare yourself to be up and running quickly or prepare yourself to be greatly distressed. It is your choice!