If your PC's hard disk (or the entire system itself) suffers from a serious crash that leaves the data on the drive beyond recovery, you'll be thankful for putting some of your upgrade budget towards a backup drive.
This is essentially a super-sized hard disk in a chassis that connects to your PC using USB 2.0 or FireWire. A backup drive usually has a simple button on the front panel that launches some supplied backup software and copies your most precious files onto the drive. You can also use a drive "imaging" utility such as Norton Save & Restore, Acronis True Image or Windows Vista's own Complete PC Backup feature to take a digital "snapshot" of the drive - every bit and byte of data.
Seagate and Maxtor both have superb one-button backup drives but our current favourite is Western Digital's My Book Premium, which sells for about $350 with a 500GB drive.
About Acronis:
Acronis is a global cyber protection company that provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses (SMBs), and enterprise IT departments. Acronis solutions are highly efficient and designed to identify, prevent, detect, respond, remediate, and recover from modern cyberthreats with minimal downtime, ensuring data integrity and business continuity. Acronis offers the most comprehensive security solution on the market for MSPs with its unique ability to meet the needs of diverse and distributed IT environments.
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses. Learn more at www.acronis.com.