In this day and age, most of the worksheets and other materials I produce are in digital form, and like many others, I have vast amounts of data on my hard drive(s). The total loss of my digital data would affect me more than no longer having access to my cupboards, shelves and filing cabinets. Would it be the same for you? How often do you back up your files?

I use a great program called Lazy Mirror to back up data to two external drives, one of which is at home and one off-site. It is free, extremely quick and reliable. It copes with me wanting to back up the same data to two different drives. It also has the big advantage of maintaining the original directory and file structure in the back-ups, which means that I can plug the external drives into another computer and access the files without needing to use software to 'unpack' them. It is possibly not the most straight-forward program to set up initially, but for features and simplicity of use once set up, I have not found better.