Back up your data now, before your computer wheezes

If you have an old laptop that starts making ominous, clicking noises, don’t wait for it to get better. It won’t. And don’t put off making backup copies of your important files, even if your computer isn’t complaining.

Sometimes failures happen without warning. Over the years I’ve had a few motherboards (the computer’s main circuit board) snuff themselves without so much as a bleep. But with older machines, the most common cause of failure is the hard drive — which not only stores all your precious data, but also has to be working in order to load the operating system when you turn the computer on.

Here’s the scary truth: Almost every computer will expire some day. I have a colleague who flogged an XT clone from the mid-1980s right up to the millennium, and retired it only when he realized it couldn’t do the World Wide Web — but that’s the exception.

If you have a machine that’s four years old or more and you get strange error messages when you start the machine — or you hear the hard drive clicking repeatedly before the computer loads the operating system — it’s time for a new drive, or if your PC is old enough, a new computer.

Should you be lucky enough to get a balky computer running, don’t shut it off till you’ve backed up your important data. You can always reinstall software, but if you lose important documents, financial records, music or photos, you could be facing disaster.

There are a variety of ways to back up your hard drive, but the easiest by far is to buy an external hard drive that plugs into a USB or firewire port. Starting at $100 or so for 150 gigabytes of storage or more, these devices are about the size of a paperback book and represent an incredible bargain.

If you really want to be secure, buy two portable units and keep one backup in a safe-deposit box, or just store it in a safe place somewhere away from your main PC so it won’t get stolen, flooded out or burned up in a disaster.

Many external drives come with “one-touch” backup software that will clone your hard disk on the backup drive and then make incremental copies of files that have changed. But that may be more work than most people want to do.

I use a free Microsoft utility called SyncToy — which was designed to synchronize the contents of any two folders, on the same drive or different drives.

I keep everything I care about in Windows’ master My Documents folder. Once a week or so, I tell SyncToy to synchronize that folder with a backup folder on two external drives. One is attached to my PC and the other to my wife’s machine on our home network. The whole process takes only takes a few minutes.

You can find this handy utility by visiting www.microsoft.com/downloads/ and searching for SyncToy. The latest versions work on Vista as well as earlier Windows releases.

Another backup possibility, if you don’t have a lot of bulky photos, music or video files, is to use a thumb-sized flash memory drive. Four-gigabyte models that plug into a USB port are available for less than $30, and higher-capacity drives are becoming cheaper all the time. Buy a couple and rotate your backups — because no medium lasts forever.