I want to remind everyone that we all have things that we must make sure we keep. There are so many things on your computer that deserve your attention more than you might think.

When I was growing up, I can remember looking through family photo albums that my parents had. It included pictures of them when they were babies all the way up to when they got married. There were also family members I had never met, great aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents. To me and my family, those pictures are priceless.

I don't know what kind of photo album my children will look at, but I'll bet you it's digital. More and more of our family photographs and letters are on our computers, sometimes only on our computer, and we have an obligation to future generations to keep it safe.

I've always heard horror stories about a family's whole history going up in a house fire or flood. Those stories always scare me and I know they bother my wife, who does our family genealogies.

Luckily, we've digitized most of our older family photos and any new photos are from digital cameras. While hard drives and CD storage is more fragile than actual photographs, digital data is able to be duplicated with no loss of quality and is very inexpensive to store. That means we can have multiple copies of it stored in multiple places and if a hard drive fails or a CD breaks, we won't have lost all those memories.

That is the whole reason this blog was started, to help you protect and keep what is most valuable to you. Whether that's your company's financial documents or your child's baby pictures, some of what you have on your computer is priceless. I want you to dedicate yourself, right now, to reading the suggestions in this blog and taking the time to protect your data. I don't want you to be too late on this. Once you're too late, there's no going back and fixing it.

I've talked about the backup plan, and I'll soon get into specifics on what programs and services to use. Keep this post in mind when reading them and, if you aren't using these services, please implement them soon. You won't regret it.