Actually, there are two issues involved with hard disks breaking:

1. You can lose your data (the documents and other files you have created). Potentially catastrophic.
2. You will have to reinstall all of your programs , settings, and operating system to a new hard disk. Potentially a major hassle.

The first item is of course the most important, and fortunately it is the easiest to safegaurd against. Safeguarding your data involves copying your data files to another data storage device.

The second item is involves copying your entire hard disk, including the System data to another storage device. This second type of backup requires a storage device big enough to hold all of the files being copied, and also requires a special program to copy the system data. One such special program is the Windows backup program, covered in the next tutorial in this series.

This tutorial will cover only data backups (safeguard against the first item above).