One of the most common computer mistakes is not backing up your data on your machine. Something happens to your computer, whether it’s a virus, spyware, adware, or hardware failure, and the next thing you know, you didn’t have the files you wanted to keep. You might as well make your backup right now before you forget about it. If you don’t have a backup plan, find out what you can do to back up.

Get a USB drive to back up your most important files. These would be like your tax records, documents, and images or videos that you want to keep. Find out the things you couldn’t live without and save them to a USB drive maybe once or twice a week. Take this USB drive and keep it in your car or at work in case of fire so your data is safe. Most of these drives cost less than $20 and you can get around 4 gigabytes of data for that price. For many people, this will back up the most important documents to keep.

Keep a portable hard drive at your desk for more frequent backups. With today’s USB connections, it won’t take long to back up your data frequently. These are large enough to hold all your media, like your images and video files, which take up more space.

There are online services that will do backups for you. Most have very high encryption, so security won’t be an issue. Many cost around $5 per month. The nice thing about this is that you can schedule backups to be done automatically assuming your computer is turned on and connected to the internet. The service will check for changes to your files and sync them with those on their servers. This is one of the easiest options as you won’t have to do anything every week once the process is set up.