No one is thrilled with making backups but some of us who lost data in the past know how critical it is to backup our data regularly. I used to make a backup of my PC on an external HDD, and replicate the contents back to forth when I get a new PC or new HDD. As size of HDD gets larger, I've upgraded my HDD a few times and finally moved to a NAS drive with RAID 1 mirroring. Having an external hard drive was great until cloud drives debutted in 2008.