Fact: Despite health food, vitamins, quitting smoking and working out, someday we all will shed this mortal coil, and so will all computer equipment.

Eventually the best-made hard drive, with all your pictures, letters, addresses and financial data on it, will just stop working. The question isn't whether a computer will fail, but when.

So, any information that you would be sad to lose needs to be saved in more than one place. That's the essence of a computer back-up.

Standards come and standards go. Time was, I installed tape back-up systems for my clients. But tape has become obsolete and so has backing up to CDs. With the price of external USB hard drives so low – and they’re huge and so fast now – well, you just can’t beat ‘em.

Now, you can get a brand name (like, Iomega™, an industry standard) 500-Gig external USB 2.0 (ample and pretty fast) on sale for about $140. Plug it into the USB port of any modern PC and boom: piece of cake; you can immediately copy files to and from it using good ole drag-n-drop.

Then there are key-fob USB drives, tiny things. As of this writing, the average one sold is probably the 8-Gigabyte size. Not big enough for full-blown back-ups, use these to carry data between computers, or for a small backup of your letters or QuickBooks™. And although they’re called “key fob” drives, don’t hang it on your key-ring… that just can’t be good.