Can anyone please give me some advice on this? I use a desktop computer at home, have had it for more than four years, and basically my entire life is stored on it (music, photos, letters, documents, ...)
Now, I understand that hard disks can fail after about four years, and such failure is sudden and total -- no warning, and once it happens you cannot recover lost data. This happened to me once on a work machine, but everything was backed up to a central server and so nothing was lost. At home I don't have such a facility.
So: any advice on the most efficient (in terms of time as well as cost) way to protect myself at home? My PC does have a CD burner (although the software no longer works) and I have a free-standing ZIP drive, but the volume of data would require an awful lot of CDs and even more ZIP disks. Or am I missing something obvious?
You may need a DVD burner, CD is just too small.
The easiest way, is download files to a CD or DVD but you need to know where are the files.
The easiest way maybe is use a software like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image which will backup your entire Hard Drive into a few DVDs, when it crashes just run the boot CD that is provided and plonk in the DVDs and it should be back to normal, no need to reinstall windows and stuff.
HDD can crash anytime, within a yr or such .. just assume it only crash after 4 or 5 yrs.
Also your backup is just as good as the last time you backed up your files.
A real time product maybe better, that is use RAID, have 2 HDDs one that you use and the other that the computer uses and does real time backing up.
If you computer is 4 years old the HD is not big (it was...).
Buy an external HD (under 100 USD for 40-60 GB) and you can copy the whole internal HD drive to it many times over.
I'd suggest a couple of nice, large external hard drives. Don't know how prices are in your neck of the woods, but here in the US one can get a 200 gig external HD for $70-80US.
Keep one close to your computer, one in a separate physical location. Backup to the "in house" once a week or after important events.
One a month (whatever time period fits) switch the in house/remote HDs. That gives you lots of backup protection not only against hard drive failure but also against fire, theft, etc.
That's the system I use. In addition I burn the "out of camera" versions of all my photographs to archival DVDs and mail to my sister.
I've got a "belt and suspenders" approach.
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