Back up early and often. I lost my 5000+ mp3 collection to a hard drive crash. Not to mention alot of pirated software. I've recovered all of the software that I wanted back but I will never find some of those mp3's. Luckily I had about 2000 of them backed up on CD's but had my stoner ass backed up 2x a year, I would have had over 90 percent of them.