Holiday Giveaway: Win one of 10 1TB + 500GB Seagate Free Agent Drive Bundles!

Hasn;t happened to me yet, but my music files, reason samplers, photos, PSD's, AI files, and all documents related to work :-s

I have never once lost data, but I know that it happens to everyone so I'm probably due! One thing I could never be able to bear losing would be personal photos and documents!

lilacflower180 AT yahoo DOT com

So far, fingers crossed I have not lost any data. My current back up system is so old fashioned! I copy files onto CD’s and so just burning CD’s is how I back things up. It makes for so much unnecessary clutter! This prize package would help me immensely because it would be a much more efficient and easier way to manage all my files. I basically am concerned about losing all of my large image files. I create digital art using fractals. I create the fractals using all of my original photographic files. I have to admit I have lost sleep in the past worrying that one day I am going to lose them all, the ones I have not backed up and it would really be a nightmare for me because I have put so much time and effort in creating some really cool art. Thank you so much for the opportunity to enter. Happy Holidays!

If I had a data loss I would be most devastated by the loss of my copies of customized databases that I've developed for clients.

My most devastating data loss was many years ago during a disk optimization process when our building suffered a complete power failure. Unfortunately, the disk was non-recoverable after that failure. We had back-ups but they were not current so we lost a number of days of work.

I just would not ever be able to get over losing any of my digital photos! And I must admit that a lot of the photos only exist on my computer and aren't saved anywhere else. My hard drive on my laptop crashed awhile back and I lost quite a bit of stuff b/c I didn't backup my data, some wonderful photos were lost along with it... And sadly, I still don't really have a backup plan.

As a sysadmin i keep telling ppl to backup. Yet... due to lazyness/no time/no space... I dont backup my self. My DDS3 drive that i used to backup with went pop last year and with drive sizes climbing its not been worth replacing it.

Over the years i've lost a 500mb (my GCSE and A Level projects, MUD code, Fido backups), a 4gb (all my old BBS stuff and contacts), a 10gb (Uni photos contacts my entire mail store) a pair of 40gbs (My utilities, images, install tweaks and old project work) and a 200gb (good bye my mp3's). That was the worst losses.

An external drive to backup to would make my life easier. I'd stop putting things off and actually do a proper backup.

Failing that... I will get a pair of 1tb drives come Feb and properly mirror them. Move all my stuff to them and get rid of the old drives... including the squeeking 40gb that occasionally looses itself in windows. (nothing wrong with its SMART status so figure it wont die yet.)

It would be so terrible if I were to lose my family history research. I've put so much work and time into it. I currently do not have many of my files backed up besides a few items on my flash drive. And luckily, I haven't lost any important data yet, but I have known a few people who have and I would like to be prepared!

I don't even own a notebook...my old puter is all I have...so I have no back up drive now. I didn't even know you could backup online until today. I'm disabled, so I can't afford new stuff. This backup drive would sure be neat...and much needed. All my family photos and such are on my one HD...it crashes...I'm dead.

I would be devestated if I lost my music. It would tkae forever to get it all back on there.

I would be devastated if I lost all my research papers! I haven't lost anything yet, but I know that I do need a way to backup my files in case anything were to happen!

Awesome...I need back up too!

i dont have a plan :( i would die if i lost our family photos

My daughter saved pictures and "stuff" onto cds, but didn't label them so I don't know what is what. Once our computer crashed and I didn't lose pictures, but they are "stuck" in the computer, I can't look at them closeup, or print, that is about as bad as just plain losing them. I was going to print stories my daughter wrote and saved, then I figure I'd have them, but there are dozens and dozens of those things so I'm coming to the realization that I need to buy some backup (but not right now, hubby's afraid he'll lose his job...the auto industry in MI, need I say more?) Until things pick up, that computer better not crash....crossing fingers.

if i ever lost all the family pics i'd be woe begotten, it would be terrible. I've never lost any data, but i did have to back up my whole computer onto disks when it went in to be fixed, i' m glad i did though because they ended up just giving me a new computer (for no extra fee, just $100 to renew the insurance contract)! thank god for HP insurance!

I'd hate to lose all my school work, plus pictures,
music, etc. Fortunately, I've never had a hard
drive crash (so far). I back up to an external hard
drive

I'm saving a few files on a 1 GB flash drive shaped like a cake. Needless to say, this is not the toughest backup out there. Help me!

I would be so devastated if I lost my daughter's baby photos and digital movies that we took of her during her first years of life. Sometimes I remember to back them up to a CD but I haven't done so in a really long time.

As a writer, if I lost my notebook would be absolutely devastated to lose all my writings and musings.

Personal photos and contact information would be my most important losses.

I've never had a huge disaster, but I've lost countless hours trying to reconstruct information that has been lost through the lack of an independent backup system. I lost everything I had on one computer when the HD crashed.

I’d be lost if the contact information for my friends & family disappeared from my Address Book. For me, those e-mail addresses and phone numbers are priceless!

I had an e-machine laptop that I had exactly for one year and the hard drive went up on it. I was devastated.

I currently have everything on my notebook, with a copy on an enternal drive. Photos, video, work, projects, you name it. If I lost it all, it would be total hell. I lost all of my home movies once, had to reimport them ALL from VHS again.

I lost all of my pictures. It sucked..and I would never want to lose them again.Memories are so important. I save all my stuff on email which is horrible.

Anything of value on my notebook is mirrored on my desktop. I use Nero Backup and a USB Harddrive to save my info. Manual process but effective

I would probably be most devastated losing my collection of family photos.

The only important data that I have lost from a hard drive failure were backups of my website.
Fortunately, I also had these stored on a second server.

I'm a writer and like most writers, I usually have several manuscripts going at once. When I first got a computer, it took a while to get used to it, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me to goof up and lose some irreplaceable files. Now I know better, but back then I was devastated.

My current backup is a 250 Sandisk USB drive which includes all top 250 imdb movies. I haven't lost my data yet and keeping fingers crossed.
A second drive would help so I could have one for both my computers.

All of my music. 10 years worth of collecting!

I would be mortified if I lost any of my pictures, home videos, music or movies.

Here is a story of a great loss for me.

I am in grade 12 at the moment and just recently, I was working on a really big project at school. We have to make a fake newspaper with a group of three friends, around 5-10 articles each. After many days of gruesome work, I finished. I had a total of 8 articles (1-3 pages each article) and dozens of pictures drawn, photoshopped and found.
I call my friends and we decide to meet at one of their homes.
So I put all of my work onto my very old, somewhat glitchy portable hard drive. Now, this wouldn't have been any risk whatsoever had I copied my documents onto it. However, when I selected all of the files to copy them, I must have slipped or missed and hit CTRL-X, rather than CTRL-C.

Little did I know, all of my hard work was on that hard drive and nowhere else. So I go to my friends house, plug in my HDD and guess what happened. Absolutely nothing.

Imagine my frustration, one day until the due date and over one weeks worth of pages upon pages of writing is gone. Well, at that moment I wasn't exactly frustrated, considering I thought that it was still on my PC.

This is getting sort of long so I will finish up quickly.

I went home, looked for the documents and saw nothing.
It is getting really late so I figure I will just tell my teacher what happened.
Anyways, he says something like, "Yeah, like I am going to believe that." It is understandable, I wouldn't believe it either.
So I failed, my friends' marks, however were not affected.

Well I learned 3 lessons from this.
Do not wait until the last minute for something that requires that much work.
Make more backups!
Remove the 'x' button from my keyboard so this can't happen again.

Oh yeah, I also had hundreds of pictures and home videos were on there, but almost 80% of them were on my PC.


I hope you enjoyed hearing about my loss.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? my personal family photos would be the worst thing 2 loose and I have before on other computers:(.

I have photos of my really cute girlfriend, I would feel bad if I lost them.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? scanned certificates from work
Have you ever lost important data- what happened? Yes, I had to accept it wouldn't come back (unless I had lots of cash) and proceeded to buy a new hard drive & importantly learn to back-up my work!

I'd hate to lose all my school work, music, finances,
etc. Once lost a paper on a thumb drive, but
was able to find a recent copy on my hard drive.

I will be crazy if I lose my school files. They mean a lot of hardships to me and the A's I've score were priceless. :P

If I Lose my research I would be devastated. I'm looking into buying an external drive if I don't win this one!

(Xavier, I thought it said it ended tomorrow night; any chance I could slip in under the wire ?)

Thanks for the giveaway...I have tons of old family photos scanned into my computer as well as some important docs; about half of these are burned onto CD/DVD's but I really should use a more efficient (i.e. external hard drive) backup solution before an internal hard drive disaster strikes, as it surely will !!!

I would just be devastated if I lost my digital pictures. Most of my pictures are not printed, so I would lose all of my memories. I have been meaning to buy a seagate ext drive, but it's kind of expensive so I have been putting it off.

Hello everyone. This Contest is now closed!

A winner will be announced by Monday.

When my notebook overheated years ago and corrupted all the data on it I was most upset about losing my pictures. Now I use a drobo, thanks to my hubby, but you can never have too much storage space :)

Yes, unfortunately about a month ago I lost ALL of our family pictures and ALL of the graphics I have made for my business in the last ten years. Devastation is the only way to describe what I feel. The real tragedy is that I have a little back-up hard drive AND a 4 gig jump stick and had everything backed up on those. The little hard drive died on the same day as my laptop (no virus, just old age and natural causes I think)and the jump stick has disappeared into the abyss. Very sad. Needless to say, I know so well the value of back of my data and don't ever want to do it again! Right now on my computer, I have a few of our family pics that I have been able to get from my blog as well as a few graphics. The most important info I have right now though is my first novel that I have been slaving away at--there's no way I want to lose that.

I'd be devastated losing my mp3s, and it happened once. I had to rekey a lot of track and album info that itunes never wrote back to the mp3 files themselves. I was able to restore the MP3s from my Dell DJ.

I am a self-employed photographer. My old computer crashed before I was able to back up 5 clients photos plus some personal photos. I was just sick about it. I still get upset thinking about it! Now I download the photos and copy to cd’s immediately (which is VERY time consuming to say the least). I really must get an external hard drive to back up to save myself time and trouble. This is an awesome contest. Thanks!

My life revolves around my notebook. All of my schoolwork, music, and photos are stored on it. If I lost my schoolwork I would start having to make lame excuses to all of my teachers, becoming a pathological liar. I would start lying to my parents and for kicks go out, party, do drugs, and gamble. After I did this, I would probably land myself in some reality rehab show, with nothing to show of myself. All of this because of some data lost on my notebook

I'd be devastated if I lost my family pictures that I have stored on my computer. My daughter lost her music collection she had stored on her computer.

What do I have on my notebook that I'd be devastated if I lost? The answer would be everything; my life. Both my professional and personal life's stored there - (work) eight years worth of my writings & project ideas, (relaxation) my audio and video files, (memories) tons of photos and home made videos... the works!

I thank my lucky stars that so far I haven't lost any data - important or not so important. And I hope this lucky streak continues :)


Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I would be sooooo upset if I lost the pictures on my laptop. I have most of my spreadsheets and documents on my PC, but the laptop has pictures that aren't backed up.

I have so much on my computer I would hate to lose! I too would love to win this!

I would love to have this. It would be the perfect Christma present!

I would hate to lose my music. I have lost a whole bunch of pictures one time.

I just recently had somebody walk into my house and steal my laptop - ACK!! Then I found out too late that my recent backups weren't saving right on my backup drive, and I lost a lot of files. The saddest loss was all the photos I'd taken all spring and summer. I desperately need a better backup drive!

Knock on wood, I haven't had any notebook deaths yet (while everyone around me has). But I have had desktop deaths. I currently only back-up via DVDs. Sucks bad. But it's all I have!

I would be devastated if I lost my photos and music!

I have a desktop, but no notebook. I'd be devastated if I lost my pictures. I've never lost really important data.

I have pictures and videos of all my kids since they were born and writing them on DVD is tedious.

I have lost some pictures when I had a HDD failure due to bad sector and it so happened to be where the pictures are located - unrecoverable.

I've never lost anything from my computer that was absolutely crucial, but my most precious thing on my computer are my family pictures. I back them up regularly on DVDs, but it would be great to not have to have tons of DVDs all around and a central location to back up all my data. Thanks for the great giveaway. Hope to win.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Old family pics.
Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Yes, but I've lived without that data.

I would be most devastated by the loss of my composed writings and notes. These are my professional livelihood. Next in line are family photographs.

I have not had a chance to morn the loss of data as I have a backup plan in place.

I'm a graphic designer without a current backup system, so I have a lot of workt hat I would really, really hate to lose.

We have a good handful of systems here at home, and every once in awhile we'll sync up files from one system to another, over the high-speed network. Turns out to be faster than burning DVDs by a long shot. We have rarely lost anything stored locally -- have had the occasional kerfluffle with email accounts getting canceled for bogus reasons, and losing huge chunks of back-story, but nothing to lose sleep over -- yet.

I ~just~ finished up a BsEE degree, so the four years worth of class schedules, course work, labs, homework, references, etc are no longer "I'd kill myself if I lost..." material. Now it's just the REST of my life/history/stuff that would be devestating to lose -- wedding video stuff, baby pictures, birth announcements, photos from family vacations, etc. I've lucked out, never really lost anything that I didn't have backed up on a campus network server, or on a 4GB USB memory stick, but there's always a first time...

i dont know what i would do if i lost all my schoolwork and of course my pictures!!!

I've got pictures on my hard drive that I'd hate
to lose. I back up over my home network to an
external hard drive every day.

pictures of my family. I've lsot essays that I was writing.

I have my photos and music. I would be lost without them.

I've lost my computer before, and while I was out a term paper I had worked for weeks on we were able to salvage most of the photos from the hard drive. Losing the photos would be the worst.

I would be devasted if I lost my photographs and music. I have my photos backed up but have not backed up any of my music (shame on me).
I have several friends who lost everything, including their computers, during Hurricane Katrina and that prompted me to immediately back up my photos.
This would make it so much easier and faster to do.
Thank you for the great giveaway.

It would completely break my heart if I lost my photos. Everything else would make me mad but not hurt me. The sentimental memories get me every time.

I have lost my whole hard drive before but it was before I was into digital photography so it was annoying and maddening but not heartbreaking.

I have photos of my father the week before he past away last year on my laptop that I would lost without them.

I have lost my final paper two days before I had to turn it in and as a result had to miss work the next day and spend the next 48 hours redoing it.

I have thousands of pictures from my travels on my laptop. It would really be devastating to lose them!
cjnedrow@gmail.com

I have lot a hard drive before. It is devistating. I had to search all my 3.5 disks to retrive as much data as possible. I still lost 50% of my data. Now enven with flash drives I don't have most of the data backed up regularily. I do it monthly. With a big super drive It would be easily done daily.

Backup?

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? MY FAMILY PHOTOS & MUSIC

Have you ever lost important data- what happened? NOT SO FAR

I'd be devastated if I lost my photos. I have so many! I've lost pictures in the past and seriously it was the worst.

I did lose a lot of important data once when my laptop got stolen. A lot of photos and a lot of school work. My laptop of course was never found and I never got my stuff back. Now I burn everything to CD's regularly.

I lost my work e-mail once, and it was the most
painful computer experience ever. I have all our
family files, photos, etc. on my home notebook.

I have my 2 kids school essays,online school assignments, their regular school work, their ipod songs, their pictures. Then theres my important data and pictures of my grandchildren, the only pictures from my daughters wedding since we are still waiting for photographer to send the originals. Important paperwork data for taxes and household. My pc crashed and we lost everything so we are still trying to regain what we can. Just have to many people and to much information for 1 pc.

Thank you
Happy Holidays

The thing that would suck the most to lose is my music. I have a ton of songs that if they were deleted I would neveer be able to fully restore them all.

I (myself) wouldn't care if I lost my pictures because I don't have any. My family would and well.. read on.

A little less than a month ago, mmy hard drive failed. We went everywhere looking for a fix, My family was willing to fork out hundreds of dollars to get it fixed. We had so much data on their. 5 years of pictures, all gone. 40,000 songs, all gone. School work from 4 people, wiped out. It was terrible, every picture that we took on a digital camera that didnt get printed (which is a lot) were all gone. We lost everything on that computer that we had for about 5 years.

We don't have an external hard drive and I can't really afford one. So I desperately need one for my family of 6. Another crash and we are 100% screwed.

holy cow! youre really serious about backing up your data!!!! i feel inadequate, i just have one backup. Ihave about 18,000 pics...so i'd probably be devestated if i lost those....i'm going to need another backup now you've got it in my head!

I am not as extreme as some in backing up data, but I have at least one external device for each of my systems. All of the data on my notebooks is greatly important. I would be LOST without it all. All of it! I also back up to CD and DVD. All of this occurs weekly, like clockwork. I am even worse with the desktop systems. Music, pictures, video, applications. All of it. I love my stuff, and the stuff that makes it all work and available to me. After a couple crashes, I am determined to never have it happen again.

I would be devastated to lose my pictures and videos. Those are memories and of great importance to me. If personal information was lost and identity taken now days you can fix all that but, pictures are memories of all the things you have done. My grandchildren are little and I take a lot of videos of them so they can look back on their life when I'm gone. That is very important to me.

I already lost it -- probably too dumb to back-up. I wrote columns for a newspaper and had recopied them all (20 years worth) on my laptop. Never did find 'em.

I have videos and pictures of my baby niece and I could not replace them.
I have never lost important data

I would be in terrible shape if we lost all of our photos, videos, music, and documents. We have had a computer crash in times past (more than once) and so it was a terrible job trying to retrieve everything. Luckily we didn't lose anything really important. I don't want to risk that anymore!

I would be devastated without my bookmarks and saved password files. I have lost data before, such as pictures and such that couldn't be replaced. I also lost my tax returns and had to get copies from the IRS. A good back up routine would have easily prevented this.

the important stuff is pictures.

I haven't actually lost anything , so far!

I need to back up photos and my wife's art projects. It would so cool.....

I'm in the lucky position that all the documents that I have on my laptop I have duplicated on my desktop PC. However, it would be annoying if I lost them off the laptop.

I would be horrified if I lost all my photos, school documents, and business information. I can't believe it took me until now to realize I had anything to protect.

I have family photos that should be backed up because they can never be replaced.

I have all my family videos and pictures, scanned on (and took months to do so) the Hard Drive. Pictures all dating back to 1982 and since then. Worried that HDD might go out since I live in an area with frequent lighting storms, power surges and outages.

Luckily I have not lost anything from the hard drive, yet. :D

What a fantastic giveaway! I'd love to surprise my boyfriend with this, because we were just talking about how we need to buy one. We have so much data that it would be much more practical to store it on a huge dedicated backup drive like this than to try and burn CDs or the like.

If I lost my word documents, that would be a big disaster, since I'm a writer. Sadly, I have lost some data before - I had a hard drive that was on the fritz, so we bought a new one, and successfully transferred all my data over without a hitch. Unfortunately, the brand new hard drive turned out to be bad as well, and it immediately crashed and ruined my data. We were able to recover a lot of it, but some things were lost to the ages. I managed to recover most of the essentials, so I wasn't too bad off, but I was sad for the sentimental things that went bye-bye.

Thank you so much for the chance to win!

I use my laptop to take minutes for several nonprofit Boards I serve on. Losing those minutes would be devasting, so I immediately copy them to a flash drive after a meeting finishes, then transfer the files from there to my desktop computer at home.

Yes, I've lost files before, usually when a ghard drive crashed, but the most recent instance was a bad OS patch, and my latest backup to an external HD was bad. I recovered some of my files from an earlier backup, but lost a lot of historical copies of content from websites I had built, and a lot of word processing documents.

Well I am one of the idiots who didn't back up her data. I lost just about everything. Fortunately all of the pictures that I scanned were saved to a tiny usb device. I need something like this to backup everything.

I would be devastated if I lost my kids pictures.

>> What is your current back-up plan? What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

As a lecturer of finance, the most important data for me are the lecture slides, problem sets, quiz questions and their solutions, grades of my former students (in case they request me for a recommendation later). Equally critical for me are video recordings of both my lectures and of those that are offered by faculty that I invite for guest lectures. Of these, the slides, questions and gradesheets are archived at the end of every course and mailed to my gmail account (and labeled appropriately for quick retrieval). I also carry these constantly on my 4GB Sandisk pendrive. Since uploading video lectures takes time (plus, webstorage isn't cheap!)and since they occupy too much of my precious disk space, I just cut CDs and hope that they don't get scratched from multiple readings. My personal data such as photos, financial data, I either upload them to my gmail account or cut CDs. I have long been thinking of getting a backup harddisk that would let me store everything at one central place and let me sleep easy. While I can store all my data - course archives, videos, photos, data - etc in the desktop storage solution, I can also carry the required course material in the portable hardisk.

>> Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

While at college, our department let us download recorded lectures. I faithfully saved them in my HD, assuming it would be useful someday. Owing to an unexpected harddisk crash, I lost every single file. Though it broke my heart, it didn't kill me as I still hadn't entered the teaching profession. Years later, when I started out as a lecturer, I realized how much of a difference it would have made to my teaching if I had those original lectures with me.

Nothing because it could all vanish at anytime due to a disk failure.

Mine has all my pictures from graduation and of my 6 week trip to Japan over the summer, which I don't think I would be able to replace if they were lost. The only data I've ever lost that mattered to me was my college application essays. They mysteriously disappeared from my computer about a month before they needed to be submitted...needless to say I spent quite a few weeks very grumpy from lack of sleep...

On my notebook are the only pictures i have of me and my girlfriend together. The last time i lost important data i had to awake all night to rewrite a report.

I would be devastated because nearly all of my work files are there. Backing up is a MUST!


ardy22 at earthlink.net

I would lose some photos, some documents and music if something happened to my notebook. My last desktop computer repeatedly crashed and I lost documents, photos and music. It is not like I lost them once, I lost them several times and I have yet to learn my lesson to backup my personal data.

All my school documents. As a teacher, losing these would be horrible. Of course losing family pictures and my music would also be heartbreaking

My digital photos and home videos. I've saved some of them online, at a lower resolution, but I'd be DEVASTATED if I lost them forever.

digital photos would be missed.

So far so good.

I'd be devastated if I lost my pictures. Luckily, I have never lost data before. I hope I don't jinx myself!

txhottie_86 at yahoo dot com

I need to back up my photos. I would not like to lose them.

I would hate to lose my new photos. I lost them all last year when my hard drive failed and still don't have a back up system.

My most devastating loss would be my photos; work stuff can always be replicated, but not so with photos.

I'm lucky enough not to have suffered any data losses. I use Folder Share to sync my Tablet PC and my desktop, but also use USB hard drives as a second level of protection. The FreeAgent would be a great help with that!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

My portfolio of graphic design works, family pictures, wedding pictures, and music.

I once lost a independent film study class project when my computer got a nasty virus a long time ago...it was an entire semester's work and was several gb big...pretty devastating, I was such a n00b...

If I had a notebook, it would probably be anything I've personally created, whether it be music, code, customizations, etc.

I have lost some rather important data a few times, and this could have been easily avoided if I had a backup system. But of course, it's not like I had the disk space to do it. :S

My personal photos and my works are my precious data

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Currently I have no important data on my notebook, everything important is on my desktop PC.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I have lost some data while experimenting with different linux installations. I made backup of the most important data, but didn't bother to backup somewhat less important data.

My photos, I'm a avid amateur photographer, and I have 1000' of photos that I'd hate to lose.....

I only lost data once, wasin the middle of writeing a book, then the HD died overnight, and lost everything, nothing I could do would restore any part of the drive, was a catastrophic hardware failure. Never did manage to rewrite the silly thing.

I have kept a "backup", if you will, of my family's photo collection for a year or two. I already lost a couple years' worth of data last year (ironically on a Seagate), which consisted of movies, photos, and documents I wished I would've backed up now. Winning these hard drives would help me further my backup solution.

I reformatted my hard drive earlier this year and somehow managed to pull all my pictures onto discs except my wedding photos...I really do need some better storage solutions, cause my husband says he has them on his computer but I am pretty sure I had ones he didnt from the honeymoon and all. I hate technology! But yet I'd love to win this.

I have to say my family photos, since I'm behind in the process of making physical copies,

I once lost a year's worth of columns I had written (and was using to submit to syndicates), and all my resume and acting experience-related files! I had to go groveling to some publishers that had rejected my submissions recently enough that they still had them - one was kind enough to return my submission, but some writings were lost forever . . . I took my backup (tape) copy of my voice reel back into a studio for a new transfer. NOW all my stuff is on my PC Hard drive, on CD-ROM, AND on my (rapidly running out of room) Western Digital Hard Drive (250 GB seemed so large when I got it . . .)

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!
Haven't lost any yet, knock on wood!

pictures would break my heart

I would hate to lose all my pictures and music again, customer files, and school work

I did just a few months ago lose everything including the research paper I was just about to submit!

I would hate to lose all my music purchases the most. I once had a hard drive crash that cost me years of photo's that i was never able to recover, so i back-up regularly now.

Its all 'bout the music baby.I might kill someone if ever my mp3 went kaboom.

Well I have got a decent collection of songs/music that took a long time searching and downloading.
Fortunately however, I have never lost any valuable data mainly because I usually make backup CD's for photos and stuff.

I have wedding pictures on my laptop that would suck to lose. But i've learned my lesson before and the pictures are on 3 other computers and on my web hosting space. Offsite backups ftw!

I've lost a research paper before when my notebook's hd got the click of death. head crash ftl!

my husband's original music!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Nothing now.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

Digital Data Lost none ever. I duplicate everything like paranoid lune ;<).

Video and Photos. I lost some of them due to hard disk crash. Luckily I did some backup prior to the crash.

To lose all of my photos and music would be terrible. First, the loss of all the memories, as well as the hours spent organizing and editting.

I have been lucky that I haven't lost anything. I did have a fatal hard drive crash on my notebook, but luckily the data was able to be recovered. That's what backing up is so important!!!

I have lost a lot of data in the past due to bad hard drives. I would be very upset if it were to happen again and I lost pictures or job related documents

There is nothing on my notebook that would be devastating to lose. A hassle: yes, potentially expensive: yes. Fortunately, the vast majority of my data is backed up on a Windows Home Server, and further on an external USB drive. I have lost data. Before I had my current backup solution in place I lost a hard drive, or two. Mostly, I lost music files. That wasn't so bad, I just had to rip the CDs again.

my personal music collection, i am a DJ and have a massive collection of Audio. while these are on CD's for use outside of the bedroom, it would be a killer to lose them on my system.

fortunately, i've never had a data loss problem yet

My computer has all the documents related to my work and other activities. I do make CD/DVD as a back up plan.

I did faced data loss when my hard drive crashed because of some power related problem. It take efforts to get the data back from different sources, and some was not backed up at all!! so lost that.

Most of my important things, photos, music and data are on CD, but I don't back up as often as I should and it's a pain to recreate.
A prize package like this would get me on the ball.

I have a vast collection of music tracks and videos on my computer. I also have a lot of articles downloaded from different web sites which are very useful for me. I would really feel devastated if I lose anyone of them.
yes I lost some important data regarding my studies recently. My system suddenly crashed and I had to format the whole system to make it work. I lost my saved data but thankfully half of the data was on my pendrive :)

On my laptop are stories that I've been working on for years, but I keep backups on other computers I don't loose the data.

I've been fortunate in that my backup scheme has kept just about every file I've ever downloaded since 1994.

I have family photos from way back, 1980's through all of the years scanned and on my comp. Photos, family videos, music and school work.

I would be devastated if I loose my hard drive with all the work and photos from vacations.

I have schoolwork, and less important music and movies. All would be a pain to lose.

I had a hard drive die, but I threw it in the freezer and was able to back up my data before I had it replaced under warranty. I was quite lucky.

My huge music, photo, and video archive

music and photos

My pics.

Losing pictures and work would be a disaster.
Currently backing up with a hard drive that is the same size, script runs at night for new or updated files.

It would be a travesty to lose my family pictures and videos

i would be devestated when i loose my movies collection and my project files

i have lost my project files when i burned them on to a dvd and the dvd got cracked.i was a majour set back

My musics and photos. Hasn't happened yet (knock wood).

The most important data would be personal data like pictures and written documents.
I've never lost important data yet. Hope the luck holds!

I would be lost with out my photos. I would hate to lose my drawings.

I learned my lesson the hard way. After I bought a new PC I gave the old one to my wife to use. Something in my head started to nag me to either replace or backup the 5 year old hard drive that she was now using for all of her data and pictures. Sure enough, one fine Sunday morning the computer would not boot. The drive was D-E-A-D (and grinding). With data recovery costing several hundred dollars, the ass-chewing was cheaper. But now I backup and have an external drive to hers to automatically backup as well.

I would sure hate to loose the pictures and the Itunes! I had a harddrive crash and the pictures were just gone! It was the worst. I do back up some stuff on thumb drives but this would be sooo much better!

I would keep some very important story files that I've written on there.

I have some very important trading formulas and emails that would be devastating to loss. I have loss this before and went through a crisis to try and recover the info.

It depends, in the middle of a semester it would be my school notes whenever I'm not at school it would be my pictures I have thousands and thousands of them.

I've been lucky enought that I haven't had any data loss. :)

Oh yea I have lost data before but was lucky it was backed up but just had to remeber where the backup was. And I would be real upset if I lost all the photos of my grandbabies

I don't have any backup and had lost all of my information before. Was not a good day. Couldn't retrieve it all.

I have lots on photos on here, especially after my desktop at home died. I really should get them printed.

I once dropped an older laptop (my dad's) and killed the hard drive. : (

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Photos I took while disassembling a vintage truck. Photos are needed to reassemble the truck correctly.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I had a hard drive that contained client web site code and graphics. I had to screen scrape what I could and re code what I needed.

I've tons of family photos ... that's probably kill me if I lost everything.

My notebook is my work computer, so I don't have any personal data stored on it. So at worst, I'd have to spend a lot of time re-downloading & re-configuring windows if the hard drive were to go bad.

The most precious data I had was actually attached to my notebook in the form of a usb flash drive. A few weeks ago the notebook fell from my desk and crashed flash drive first onto the floor. That drive was utterly destroyed. All my Roboform passwords were on there, so were about 30 portable apps & lots of personal data.

Thankfully I had a backup of the entire drive on my ftp site from a month prior, but I lost everything that was written to the drive after that point. Those flash drives are fragile and I would love to win one of these hard drives to back up my data daily..hoping for some luck!

Mac

Everything ... probably too much stuff!

My research papers! Never lost anything important though since I am sure to backup!

I was really devastated when I lost my photographs. It happened to me once when my home computer crashed. I did not have a full backup and ended up losing a lot of memorable photos, which I was unable to recover. Now, I am religious about backing up my data in offline storage.

Right now, I have photos of my family on my computer that I wold be devastated to lose. I want to add videos but I am afraid to do so because of the chance that I might lose them. Fortunately, I have not lost any important data yet.

I would be really devastated if I lose my laptop - because it is rental from college, has all of my notes/assignments, E-Books, and especially my exam notes; I had lost data before, the hard drive crashed - unfortunately, the college did not have a backup plan and had to replace a new hard drive. I learned my lessons by backup the important data frequently to a DVD/CD disc - no budget for external HDD (on student budget :(

Everything - Beginning with the memories, family and friend photos, vacation photos, and photos of once in a lifetime special events. On top of that there are the many hours of my digital family home video. If any of this were to be lost I would be devistated. Then there is all of my multimedia, music, movies, and games. Obviously all replacable, but having such an extensive collection would be expensive to replace. And finally, work and school documents. Everything I have studied, written, and published is saved on my computer, and I would rather not lose the only traces of years of hard work that I have saved up.

And Yes, I have lost important data before. I had an external hard drive crash on me about 2 years back which, at the time, contained the majority of my multimedia, and school projects and documents. I was able to recover most of the multimedia off of players such as my iPod, but all my school work was lost. I would rather not have to experience something like that again.

With all the work writing that I do, I have lost several years of archives when my computer crashed. So I use a service through Microsoft Office to back these files up.

I would be devastated if I lost the family photos, as most of them were NEVER printed. I had this happen before. My computer crashed & to this day I have not been able to get back those precious memories.

I don't hav notebook...
I hav my personal Desktop. I havnt lost any data yet.

My current backup plan is this:
Firstly, a prayer to merciful Minerva that nothing will ever go wrong with my laptop and that it will never get stolen or damaged, despite the amount of travelling I do.
Secondly, if anything should ever go wrong, God forbid, I would check that all my music and photos are still on A-drive, where I deposited them for free several months ago and then completely forgot about. I would, of course, lose anything added to my laptop since I uploaded them, but there you go.
Thirdly, I would root out the DVDs to which I copied the same music and photos, just in case. I'm pretty sure I backed them up properly...Once again, anything added in the past half year would be lost.

So, I think I have most of the things that I would hate to lose backed up, even if it is in a rather half-arsed fashion. Whether I still have the registration numbers for various software I'm running, I couldn't say for sure. Either way, it would be annoying to have to search out and download the relevant software that it has taken me a while to put together from various free offers. (I wonder where those registration numbers are?)

If I had a genuinely safe backup I would, for the first time in my life, do a Dell System Restore. I think I have accumulated so much trash over the years, both in the registry and everywhere else, that the thought of having my laptop back to its pristine condition is really very attractive. This time I would know how to look after it from the get-go, not like when I first got it. Until now I have never dared try a system restore, just in case something goes horribly wrong, A-Drive goes bust on the same day and my backup DVDs turn out to contain only error messages.

More than anything, having an external drive big enough to take not only a copy of the contents of my own laptop, but also perhaps a copy of my mum's and girlfriend's computers as well, would make me feel less nervous about my amateurish attempts to make either of them load in less than 20 minutes on startup.

I use my notebook for audio recordings at business meetings, so I'm not sure I'd be heartbroken if the hard drive crashed. I also use it for presentations, but I always save the original on my desktop - I guess that's the luxury of having 2 PCs in 1 office.

I produce electronic music, and althought I do have it backed up, losing the original multitrack files of the songs I produce or remix for other artists would be devastating. Backups like whoa....

I lost my resume (just finished updating it, and hadn’t sent it out yet) along with a bunch of photos of my best friends wedding after a power outage fried my power supply, which then took out my hard drive. It was a little disappointing. Now, I keep all of my pictures and important documents on my hard drive as well as thumb drives. This would go a long ways toward solving the problem of trying to figure out what files are on what thumb drive. I could put it all in one place.

There isn't anything that would be a devastating loss and haven't lost any data.

My current backup plan for my computer is storing my valuable data in cds and dvds.he most devastating loss will be the loss of my family photos and movies collection which i had struggled a lot to collect, storing them in the form of dvds or cds is not affordable and also hurts me a lot when the dvds gets damaged . I have lost my valuable dats only once due to HDD faliure. And lost a lot of money and time to collect them back and doesnot got all of them back

I currently have no backup media. I have many songs and movies in my computer which I collected from various sources spending lots of time and money. Those are very valuable to me. I can't afford to collect it once again if it is lost. A backup media will be very helpful to me.

I have lost my data several times due to hard disk failure.

I would be devastated if I lost my pictures. I have never lost any important data before.

Images of figure skating performances -- a frozen moment in time!

I’d be devastated if i lost my pictures ...vacation,Christmas,Prom ...oh yeah that would be devastating !! i would love to win this "Backup" Drive !


thanx bunches! :)

Images of girlfriends and our lives together

I'd be sad if I lost my pictures.

My photos of course, plus my web pages and ad sense work.

I would hate to loose all of my pictures. No I haven't lost important data

I'd hate losing my pictures and music.

Yeah, I'm a writer, cartoonist, and an internet talk radio host... All my creative stuff, drops, and old shows get backed up. That's my life! If I lost my data, I'd lose my life. That, and I got a butt load of music, and almost every Tom Baker Doctor Who episode.
That would totally suck

Photos, have not lost anything yet, knock wood!

does losing my laptop count?

We currently back up our website on our share drive but we need to back everything up in a different way. This would help uur not for proffit website!!

i would be devastated if i lost my photos, artwork, old schoolwork and programs. i've actually had my computer die before and lost all those things years ago. i think it was from a virus or something.

There are three main things that I would be unable to live without if they disappeared. Those three things are: pictures, music, and school work.
There was one time where I thought I had lost all of my pictures. I was clearing off my Zune and I accidentally pushed the delete from computer button without realizing. Well a week or so later I went to look through my pictures only to find the folder completely empty. I was going nuts because I had no idea how they could have been deleted. I thought it was a virus or something and I was flipping out. Luckily I decided to look in my recycling bin and I found all of my pictures. It took my heart a while to slow down after that incident.

Losing any of the projects i'm working on for the university will be a complete disaster.

Till now i haven't lost anything that was valuable and i didn't manage to recover somehow.

my videos, i have never lost anything important.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? I have many years worth of family digital images. I also have all of my work for college on my notebook which I currently back up on a memory stick. I want to back this up on an external.
Have you ever lost important data- what happened? No, I normally like to back up but have become lax lately. Need to jump on board!!!

My photos, my music my favorites file! Oh yeah and robo form! Did I say that I just lost everything on my computer the night before black friday, had to do a compelte system wipe and restore! Not kidding..lost everything.. you dont know what you'll miss till its gone! Seriously would have been nice to have had this just a little sooner.. but it will keep me from going thru this in the future!

With around 8GB of personal photos on my computer these days we would be devastated if they were to be lost. Photos capture a moment and once that moment has passed it will never happen again - they are truly irreplaceable.

I've come really close to losing everything not so long ago - My iTunes library and photos were on an external hard drive that failed. I lost my entire iTunes library (which lead to so, so many hours of feeding my computer CD after CD...) but, thanks to a big pile of CDs, *most* of my photos survived.

If I lost any data on my Mac, I'd be really upset.... Years of photos, games, movies and music, not to mention my client's projects.

Having to start over from scratch would certainly be a huge loss.

I'm a digital artist. I've been obsessively collect vectors and images for use in my art for the past 4 years. Sadly, I'm not a obsessive about backing these images up. I would be totally lost without my Macbook full of images.

My laptop contains my iTunes collection, images from my digital camera and important documents.

I had my hard drive crash. I all of my digital images on the hard drive and I didn't think about backing them up. My wife nearly killed me because most of the images were of my son when he was growing up. I learned my lesson, now I have copies on other hard drives and burn them to DVDs.

On my computer right now I have the complete assets for six websites I am building, lots of photoshop documents and video projects. I back everything up to DVD-Rom because I lost some big projects after a hard drive crash several years ago. These back-up drives would come in mighty handy. Thank you for the great give-away.

I would be devastated if I lost my digital photos. Luckily I haven't lost any as of now, but a backup drive like this would be a great help!

I would be devastated if I lost all of my photos. I have over 30 GB of photos on my computer because I am a photographer. If I lost these photos I would be out of many jobs and would probably make a lot of people sad (beings I have wedding photos on my computer from tons of newlyweds). It would be a blessing to have backup for all of these photos.

Not much, really. I've wiped it and reinstalled everything 3x. Everything I need is backed up to my desktop.

I'd be devastated if I lost my family pictures.
I've not lost stuff at home, and nothing really at work, but I've been inconvenienced by having to restore from too many different places, CDs, DVDs and my 160GB external HD.
I've recently started putting my family pictures on-line.

1. All of my notes (written in OneNote on my Tablet PC)
2. No, and I'm lucky for it

It's important to me to backup these: family & daughter photos & mp3 collection (really huge). I've never lost anything until now, but I should be cautious, so these drives would help me a lot.

My son took mine to school. I need a new one.

Great giveaway -- thanks!

Knock on wood, I've never had a catastrophic data loss that I can recall -- nothing more than a couple of days' work, which could be recreated (with some effort). However, I do have a couple of thousand pictures and videos on my machine, and I would be devastated if I lost them! I've been using CDs and DVDs as my backup method, but having an external drive -- like a Seagate FreeAgent drive! -- would be so much easier!

Family pictures.

What's important: Pictures + music + receipts.

I've never lost data... but I also back-up weekly.

I would be devasted if I lost all my digital photos. I've lost precious work documents that took hours to redo, and some were lost forever. I have only backed up half of my documents so far. Crossing my fingers that nothing happens before I back up the remaining half, and also crossing my fingers that one backup is enough in the meantime.

1. I would be devastated if I lost my family digital photos.

2. I have lost important data. Microsoft Windows crashed and I lost all my data.

I never thought I would ever need so much back up! But when my HDD crashed two years ago, I replaced it, and also bought a back up drive. At the time, I thought 250MB would be enough. But with all the family photos, copies of homework from shcool, and blue prints needed for my hobbies, I decided a 1TB would be more apropriate.

I have all my pictures and data from various programs I have like taxes, calendars. So backing up is a requirement to make sure I don't loose anything.

Hey Xavier

I would be so devastated if I lost the photos of my grandparents who have passed away. They were so close to me, and to look at the photos when im feeling down or having a bad day reminds me of the good times we spent together. I also wouldn't want to loose the 3 years work ive done toward my degree in web design/development as Ive got alot of projects/course stuff stored on my laptop.

We planted a new church last year and on my MacBookPro I have all the pictures, videos, slideshows, stories of life change, contacts, and so much more covering the entire first year in the life of this exciting new church. If I lost it, so much of our history would not be able to be shared. We've done a ton of good so far and want to keep it up. Tech and the accompanying data is crucial to our church.

I forgot to mention: Jesus saves... so I guess I should too! This portable drive would help!

Family photos. That would be really bad if I lost those. Luckily, I haven't not had a data lost problem in the past.

I would be devasated if I lost my family photos.

My biggest concern would be photos. I have thousands of them from over the years and both me and my wife would be devastated if we lost them. On top of that, my wife is pregnant and expecting in June, so I know at that time the camera is going to be snapping constantly and I'll probably start using my camcorder a lot more. Too many memories to leave it to chance.

Photos, music, and since I'm a graduate student data from research and a multitude of papers.
When I started college my parents crashed the computer before I was able to get everything off of it. We had a limited amount of time to get information off of it before all data was wiped permanently. Unfortunately the CD-writer was down and USB was not readily available at that time. Everything that fit was put onto hard disks, many hard disks. Everything that didn't (including a sizable MP3 and video collection for the time) was lost.

I store on my laptop photos that I take while I'm out of the house. My laptop's harddrive isn't too big so having a external harddrive like the Seagate would be great!

I've only lost data once. I had my flash drive fail on me and luckily the data I was storing didn't matter and most of it was backed up on other places.

Photos. Yes, I have lost data many times, mainly due to Windows crashes.

Like most everyone else commented, I would lose priceless family photos and music, but there's more. Reloading a PC takes FOREVER - At least to get it back to the way it was before a crash... I would use a spare external drive to store an image of my PC, for easy disaster recovery. You can't have too much storage space...
I love the new form-factor of the 'Go'. What a great concept... portable AND dockable; with a 5 year warranty!

I would be devestated if I lost my family photos and my music files. I have been lucky so far not to lose any important info, knock on..er..uhm.....computer case.

Family pictures would be the worst loss on my home computer as they are irreplaceable given this age of digital cameras. We back up to CD once in a while but don't always keep up with it. Having it automatically back up to an external hard drive would be best.

As far as what I've lost... In most cases it was due to an inadvertent delete. Having a backup drive would help that.

I've got basically everything that you can imagine scanned or otherwise in native digital format - from tax returns, to x-rays, to entire literature that i've written.

Lost a lot of important data on my own fault. Didn't backup at all and once I was upgrading my PC, forgot to *manually* do things. Lost a lot of college stuff in the process... but this was before the day when people stored everything (photos, video, music) on HDDs and DVDs

My 10 pages term paper that's due on this Friday.

I'd hate to lose photos...I've lost a lot before, during a crash.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

I don't save any of important information of mine on the laptop. Most important things are on my desktop PC, which doesn't have a backup drive too... :(


Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I've lost information 2 times.
First was 6-7 years ago when my old 8,4 Quantum Fireball died. With his last breaths I've managed to transfer part of the files on new HDD.
Second time was when I tried to install Linux on my PC and the Windows partition bacame fuc*ed up. :( Fortunately I barrow an almost empty 200gb HDD form a friend and save a lot of my files via GetDataBack for NTFS (God bless the programmers of that product :))!

my back up drive, just die and my huge computer was back up there. including all the big files i didnt' want on my laptop. just gone gone.

I'd be devastated if I lost my photos, videos, and music. I have lost files before but so far nothing that I couldn't replace. I lost some data and program files that were on a corrupt DVD.

anything... it's such a pain to get everything back up and running again and to restore lost data. the one upside is that you tend to upgrade everything and you get to start fresh again.

my laptop has my life on it. Papers from college, pictures of family and friends, financial records, my resume! etc! I am one of those people that has been lucky and never lost any data even though I am not very diligent about backing up because i don't have enough external storage space.

Everything of importance is already backed up on multiple external hard drives. Nothing wrong with having a few more backup drives though :)

No important data losses so far.

My financial transactions and my resume/job search contact info. I just had to reformat my hard drive and I have been searching for some of my documents by e-mail.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

Over the years I have lost data from switching computers or a virus here and there. It's very upsetting to know that you will never get them back. I have over 100GB of home video of my family on my computer, as well as 200GB of my DVD collection, 40GB of pictures and 80GB of my personal music. All of which, the home video, is the most important, as that is way too many DVD's to back up in a physical form. I would probably use my 160GB external Seagate drive for target practice, at least relieve some pent up anger over losing all of my memories.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
I have a lot of pictures of my dog, who I lost less than a year ago. I also have pictures of my son's birth. I hate to lose any of them.

Have you ever lost important data?
I was in the middle of a video project, and the drives crashed. I lost all of my video, and the project was almost done, and was supposed to air in a few days. Some of it could be re-batch captured, but a lot of it had been captured incorrectly (no tape name, captured without timecode, etc.) and was just gone. It was a huge nightmare.

Pictures and music are the my most important files. 2 years ago I lost 25 gigs of music due to some horrible file management on my part. To top that off just a week ago my wife's macbook hard drive died... both situations involved files that weren't backed up. Reason being: our current 250 gig external hard drive is full. Bad luck.
We're now in the proccess of searching for replacement hard drives.

I would hate to lose my personal photos. Also all of the bookmarks that I have collected over the years. It would be hard to find all of the sites I visited if they are not regular spots that I check often.

I have been lucky that I have never had a hard drive crash on me yet or any important data lost.

I should say work but it would really be photos.

I'd be heart broken if I lost my photos,my favorites list and ofcourse our finacial records

My first desktop computer was a Dell in the Napster era. Within a few weeks in my adolescence I had acquired what seemed like a massive music collection, as well as copying everything from the old computer before selling it. Less than two months later the Dell crashed, and despite promises from Dell they were unable to restore anything. About 10 years later I always keep at least 2 copies of data - on HDDs in enclosures and also on DVD-Rs in another physical location. thanks!

I attempted to "upgrade" my laptop from XP to VISTA. It was a disaster! I lost everything and had to revert back to XP anyway.

I've never lost any important files, but my PC is full of pics, I have at least 20-30,000 pics taken in the last few years, would die inside if I lost those.

Music is something that I have constantly have lost and away on another computer never getting the chance to transfer or backup my music. Which this backup drive this would be perfect.

I'd be devastated if I lost my pictures. They document my childhood home and the first moments of my twins' lives through every little trivial thing that I found value in at one time or another.

Have I ever lost any important data? Absolutely. However, time has healed those wounds to the point I can't put my finger on anything that was tragic at the time.

I would be devastated to lose the pictures of my dogs as puppies!

I've never lost data so I guess I'm really lucky :)

I would hate to lose my digital memory of the past three years, but it is backed up regularly

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I upgraded the Netscape Navigator suite, which corrupted my email. Never was able to get registration numbers for a couple of downloaded programs.

32 GB and 14 years of family photos, and the speech my daugher gave at her bat mitzvah.

the other 20 GB of work stuff is worthless compared to those memories

I would hate to lose the digitized copies of our old family pictures. Some files contain restored and repaired copies. Please accept my entry. Thank you.

I have lots of pictures on my computer. Luckily those have been ok, but I have had an external drive die, taking along with it lots of music and some old files from previous computers.

I have lots of pictures that I saved on a external hard drive that something happened to and now can't access them. I have spoken with a company who can retrieve them for a PRICE. I am definately in need of a new backup system and a backup to the backup.

photos of our family

My pictures and my recipes. My pictures are all digital and I have not had time to have them all printed up and then there are my recipes. I am a chef so losing the would kill me!

All my work emails, my development database and three years of accumulated documentation related to work issues.

I do have a small backup drive, but stupidly I keep it on the desk right next to my laptop. If something catastrophic like a fire were to happen, they'd both be useless. I probably need to look into online storage as well.

I lost my thesis in my last year of college. So distressing. I have a small back-up hard drive where I keep the most important stuff but it is not nearly large enough for the rest of it.

Emotionally- my photos and my favorites files. I've spent a lot of time organizing them and have a lot invested in them emotionally.
Practically - all my financial and tax data. It would be impossible to recreate all the tax data for myself and my clients over the years, not to mention trying to file a return without all my financial data.

I lost all of my email once. Most everything else was small enough to copy to a thumb drive and save when my computer got corrupted. I had to format and partition the drive to reinstall everything.

My e-mail addresses along w/
my photos

I would be devestated to lose all my old photos and rare songs.

Never lost any data though-yet.

Thanks!

I would be devastated if i lost my photos, digital art, and my itunes library. I have had drives fail and have spent days scouring the drive for lost files.

thanks

I would hate to lose any of my digital photos that I haven't backed up to DVD-R yet (about 5 months worth).
I have lost data on a WD MyBook external drive that crapped out 1 week after I got it. I lost the original of my favorite photo that I took of my girlfriend. So pissed me off. The only saving grace is that I have made a resized jpg of the RAW file to use as a desktop background so at least I still have that.

I so need to back up all of my pictures, which include all of the pictures I scanned of my older son, baby pics of the youngest, family vacation and just pictures of us having fun.

I would be devistated if I lost any of my pictures. Especially those of my brother and his kids since he died in a car accident this last summer. It's hard to look at those photo's today but some of them are the of the last time I saw him.
The only data that I lost that wasn't backed up was some pictures sent to me through email.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I have digital pictures on my notebook that are irreplaceable. My 2 yr old's first steps, his first birthday, my wedding, and many more memories.

I have been lucky and have not lost any data other than a misplaced file here and there.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

My music library.
I have never lost important data, I wouldn't be that stupid.

You bet!

Early on I was unable to transfer data from the old computer to a new one so I had to redo items. I now know how to transfer data and I back upl

I would be devastated to lose my personal Photo albums,lot of english movies,sidney sheldon novels,lot of computer ebooks, musics etc.. every thing in my back up is important to me.Till now i did not lose any thing.

I am using Seegate's 5000 GB external hard drive for back up.Just it is filled, need to buy another.

I have a MASSIVE colection of mp3s and currently back them on on dvd-rom. It would a lot easier to have them on one large external drive.

I would be and have been devastated. My photo's, music, a few movies and many othr things I could lose would make me nuts.
I have lost pictures and music and work and the list goes on and I still dont have backup except for some burned cds and dvd's.

I would be devastated to lose my pictures, especially the ones that I haven't uploaded anywhere else like facebook because they're too..."sensitive" =P

I haven't lost data that wasn't replaceable...yet!

I have screenplays I've written, an unfinished novel (that I may even convert to a finished one, someday)... essentially everything I've ever written/recorded/filmed is on my laptop with no backup at the moment because I can't afford a decent backup drive.
I've had failures before, but in the past I had backups, so I was lucky. If anything happens now... I don't even want to think about it.

I would be devastated if I lost photos of friends, relatives, and travels. Those are irreplaceable! And CDs and DVDs get to be kind of klunky when you start needing several for a backup, and twice as many to make doubly sure! Thanks!

I would be devasated to lose my pictures. I never save them, which I know I should. I have never lost anything valuable.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I would be devastated if I lose my pictures and my collection of music. Ever since purchasing a digital camera, my family and I have not really printed any pictures (mainly because we see how ugly they are beforehand and are reluctant to print out those magnified pimples and blemishes), but, seriously, we do not really have the time and money to do much with them except look at them once in a while on the computer. We need to take time to print the ones we love. With that said, we have lost a whole collection of photos before. It was our first family digital camera and dad's first laptop. The laptop suddenly crashed after the trip, and we had not backed up the data. Fortunately, we also brought a camera that used eh, regular film, so we had some pictures and memories of the trip. That was a sad day in the household.

The collection of music contains all my favorites when I was a wee little second grade till now. It also contains some of my mom's favorites, which I find amusing at times. :)

Thanks for the opportunity. Peace.

I have a lot of my writings on my PC. I don't know what I'd do if I were to lose all that work.

I'd say photos are the worst to lose.

i would really like this.....mine is ....8 yrs. old

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
-----> Like most people I would be the most upset about my photos as well as my journal that I keep on the harddrive

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
-----> I once lost an entire harddrive, it held all the information that I was afraid to lose and I lost a great deal of it. I was able to recover some data with a program that rebuilt it but not all and some things I have never been able to replace.

I lost a bunch of photos and numerous tax returns stored on my laptop. I need to back up more than I do now.

I'd be devastated if I lost all of my pictures. I've never lost important data that couldn't be replaced.

I would be absolutely devastated if I lost my school documents folder...as a college student, I'm constantly writing essays and papers. I like to save them too for reference in the future, and I would hate to think of losing all this hard work!

I haven't lost anything that I haven't been able to retrieve. I would hate to lose my digital photos.

pictures would make me lose it...and I'd be upset if I lost my music too!

Is that one of those solid state drives? I got a drive that's starting to slow spin at start up.

The most important thing on my laptop is primarily digital photos.

The most important data I have on my notebook is pictures of the children and grandchildren. I don't have a back-up plan yet. Hopefully, might win one in the future.

i'd be absolutely devestated, period if i lost anything on here. i can't live without my laptop. don't know what i'd do without it. never lost data and hope i never do.

I download pictures from my camera while on vacation and would sure hate to lose them before I get home and copy them to another harddrive.

i would be devastated if I lost my photos. I am a huge picture person and wow, i think i would freak out if all of a sudden they were gone. One time, I did lose all of my pictures off my laptop, but not before i backed them up on my desktop.. whoosh, boy was that close.

Thanks for the contest!

I wouldn't want to lose the hundreds of familt photos stored on the computer.

Hardware failure, but thought it was software. Tried to restore from backup and it destroyed my backup index so I could not recover at all.

One year, we took in a friend of ours who was in a bad wreck. We used to work together at a PC repair shop and he was brilliant before he accident. I really thought he still knew what he was doing. Well, one day he convinced me to move my photos to the hard drive of a PC he put on my network. Against my better judgement, I went ahead and did it. That night, he wiped that hard drive and years of photos are now gone. Broke my heart and I learned a valuable lesson.

I have 13,000 pictures and many GB of music that I would love to transfer to a backup drive.

Luckily, I have not lost any data.

MP3's, photos and of course, my work. Have been lucky so far though

I would be devastated if my digital pictures, addresses and
personal documents were lost in a hard drive crash with no
external backup.

My digital photos. But I have backed-up most of them.

I have digital family photos on my computer that I haven't backed up elsewhere. If I lost them I would be so upset and mad at myself. They are irreplaceable.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

--> definitely, definitely, definitely music.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

--> yes. :(

I have no back up, I would be losing pictures and some wonderful music.

just photos

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?


I'd be devastated if I lost my extensive genealogy research (I take my laptop on vacations when researching data)! I've lost pics but that was many years ago when a friend of my son used my pc and downloaded a virus. Haven't lost anything since though, thank goodness.

I back up crucial files--like my manuscripts--to a small external drive. I'd love to use Time Machine on my Mac, but I'd need one of these capacious beauties to hold all my files.

all my pictures of my grandkids. last time it took me over 6 months to get them back from friends and family

Family pictures for sure! We lost some a few years ago and every family member whom we had sent pictures to over the years emailed us the ones they had and we were able to recover some of them. We would really love to win this...peace of mind for Christmas...what a great gift!

i don't have back up plan. but, i want one for my family photo's and family tree

Photos...many many photos

Family photos

Email. I've been lucky so far.

I would be devastated if I lost my wedding pictures! Theyre all digital. I really should already have one of these drives.

My photo collection from my digital camera, my
husband finally convinced me why go digital just
to print out and put in book, so now they are on
our notebook. Yes, the last computer we had, had
the nerve to crash, and even the local computer
store wasn't able to recover what was on it and
I lost all my favorite & needed website addresses
and had to hunt and look them up again, so now, I
have them listed on paper and stored in a file
cabinet.

I need to start to backup all of my pictures and music. I am not sure what I would do if I lost them all.

i work alot in digital media. like 3d rendering for games and commercials. sound effects for movies and commercials. so i have many models sound files ad textures images made from scratch that i would lose. it would really effect my livelihood. i would go out and buy one one my self but im tight on cash.

My photos were lost and I am so mad I had no back-up.

I really wouldn't want to lose my family photos and trip photos. Thanks for the contest.

i'd be devastated if i lost my huge music collection since i'm a musician. music means everything to me, and i know the pain of losing music. it's happened before when my computer crashed and i got the blue screen of death and had to reformat, and don't want to go through that again at all. hope i win so i have peace of mind!

My pictures and my itunes, I would hate to lose either.

I actually really don't have anything on my laptop that I would be devastated to lose. That being said, I also currently have no back up system in place to backup any of my graphics, documents, or even emails at all. My laptop is also full and I have been having trouble finding space to save things lately. This would be great to have so that I can actually back stuff up and have some space to save big files!

I have had 3 drives fail on me and no recovery. All my photo reference and documents and art scans.
So over and over I have had to recreate all of it.
Ouch.

Right now I would be devastated if I lost my pictures. I lost my secondary hard drive back in 2005. Unfortunately, all my music and digital photos were on that drive - so everything was gone.

"What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?"

Photos…. With the wonderful technology of digital cameras, comes an easy chance for a life time of photos to be lost.


"Have you ever lost important data- what happened?"

Yup photos… pictures of my son growing up, pictures from my wedding, first anniversary spent at Niagara Falls etc.. lost a lot of collage work I had on there, but that nothing in comparison to a life time of memories.

I would be devastated to lose all my word files and pictures. I did have a close call, but was lucky enough that we were able to save many of the word docs and most of the pics, but I lost everything else.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

I will lose a lot of creative data and business data. My mom and I have a small business and we keep our databases and accounting histories in the hard drive. It would be an accounting nightmare if we lost that data! Not to mention the customer database that we have established. We also have the photos for all our original items and it would be extremely costly to have to re-shoot everything, in terms of time and money.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Back a couple of years ago I was working on a report for school, and halfway through the report my computer gave me the "blue screen of death". I was freaked! I wasn't very good with computers back then so I never did any kind of regular maintenance or defrag the computer. So I pretty much lost my report and had to start from scratch. Not fun.

Thanks for this amazing contest!
Candy

I would be devistated if I lost any of my pictures. I wold also be devistated if I lost any of the papers I wrote in college. I may have graduated over 3 years ago, but I like having them 'just in case'.

I actually lost some data on a work computer last month when a HUGE report was due. I called the company we purchased the database program from and they said it was a vista error. I spent a few sleepless nights trying to re-type all that back in.

I would lose over 5000 itunes and wedding picture's!!

I don't have a notebook (yet!) but I'm trying to change that...

Photos and music, but my techie son harps on me to back stuff up, so I do!

I would hate to lose all my music, pictures and files. Although I do save to email occassionally. Unfortunately, if email servers were dumped, I'd basically be SOL

I would be devastated if I lost all of my school work.I also have a lot of music and pictures that I couldn't bear to lose. I have never lost important information, but it could easily happen.
smchester at gmail dot com

Just about a month ago my compter crashed...I lost a years worth of pictures, all my docs and music

All my Pics and music

I haven't lost anything yet. Family pics would be most devastating to lose. We don't back these up, but I have been trying to keep up on my scrapbooking so their is a hard copy for most.

My pictures I have uploaded to photobucket. But I would be devasted if my daughter lost the videos that she makes and they are originals, but she's a teenager and doesn't even think to backup anything.

Haven't lost anything yet, thankfully. Family photos would be my biggest loss. I back up photos on disks, which is tedious - and I forget to do it on a regular basis. This would make my life much easier!

I would hate to lose my photos and itunes. I have no backup plan.

my grocery list

Photos would be the worst thing to lose--just about everything else can at least be reconstructed. Lost the spreadsheets for my rental properties early this year & had to reconstruct them. Wasn't as bad as it could have been since it was early in the year, and I always print off the yearly spreadsheet to keep with tax papers, so had just done that for 2007.

There are photos I would hate to lose. I've never had a major loss knock on wood. Pretty amazing considering I don't back up.

I guess the MP3 files. I've never lost anything yet. Thanks for the giveaway.

I'd be devastated if my digital photos were lost for sure. Losing my music would be pretty bad too...

My keepsakes,letters,photos,songs,scrapbooking. My life is on my computer.

my biggest loss would be my music. it actually scares me a lot to think about ever losing it.
thx!

would be most upset loosing my digital pictures. Would be great to have a place to back them up

I really need to download photos and documents from work. I have had a hard drive fail and could only recover some data. It would be awesome not to worry and have everything saved.

I had everything on my computer accidentally erased by my daughter. Luckily it was my back-up computer and I didn't lose all my family pictures.

My Documents----NO

Whenever I'd get a new computer, I'd always move all my files and data from my old one. If something unfortunate were to happen to this notebook, I'd lose not only my media collection, but also my personal works, essays, photos, videos, designs and many projects going back to my high school years.

And yes, I've had drive failures (with an "s") in the past, but after the first I learned to keep backups. (That, and I also avoid deleting stuff from my older machines.)

The thing on my notebook that i would be devastated if i lost or it went poof... would most likely be photos and home videos. losing memories of joyous events would be terrible.

The most important data I've ever lost would be a project for one of my classes. I had to spend 5 more hours to recreate the work i did.

Family pictures, Mp3s, the game I have been designing, quite a few things actually.

I'd go crazy if I lost all my kids photos.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Currently nothing but maybe a few pictures here and there. Most everything on there I have a back up of it on a few other hard drives.


Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Windows destroyed a bunch of my files and settings on my computer for disabling one of it's features. To say the least I was damn pissed. That'll show me not to back up log files and whatnot...

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Pictures and movies of my daughters. They grow so fast and I would hate to lose the first few years worth of pictures.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened? So far I have been lucky at home. No real losses. I have lost some files at work. I had to redo the work. Ugh!

sounds like the apocalypse to me...I have tons of photos,video,emails,personal documents like resumes and college papers. I would be a very , very sad girl!

I have to say i would miss by pictures and all my documents and bookmarks. Most of them are backed up to dvd cd but it is still the thought of not ever seeing them again. I have never had a HD crash on me but there is always that possibility that I could happen.

All my pictures, essays, and stories would be lost if my computer broke down. I have lost data in the past, and now have to save all my files to my email as a backup, which is soon running out of space.

There are plenty of things on my laptop that I'd be devastated if I ever lost permanently. I'm a programmer and I keep the source codes for everything I've ever done on my laptop. Losing them would be like losing my life's work.

There's also my music. I've got a very extensive music collection that's a little over 10 years in the making (pretty much since CD's and MP3's became the norm), which is organized physically by album and author, and up until recently they were all individually rated on a 0 to 5 star scale with winamp...
Unfortunately, all those ratings just up and disappeared one day due to a glitch while upgrading versions, and it turns out that I neglected to back up the file that stores them...[sigh]

I am a professional photographer just starting out and it be HORRIBLE if any of my shoots got lost. I'd be devistated and my clients would be, too. ESPECIALLY if they were wedding pics!

My old computer crashed on my a few months ago and I lost all of my personal digital pictures for the past 5 years. It was a horrble experience. I actually paid $500 to get them retrieved! I'd rather not have to do that again.

I don't keep much important information on my computer, but I would be pretty much devastated if I lost all my music. I lost all my files about 3 weeks ago, including my music files. Luckily, I had backed them up a week before. I've got some extremely rare music that I only received from members of the bands that would be extremely hard to track them down again!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I keep all of my documents on my main PC, not on my notebook but I'd be devastated to lose the images that I DO have on there that I haven't backed up yet... *goes to back up now*

no backup plan here... AHHH!

I actually don't have a back-up plan other than burning my music to DVD's.

Devastating loss?
Photos that I haven't finished processing, backed up, "published".

Lose important data?
Not in the sense of a catastrophic hdd failure. I do misplace stuff all the time. Some of it I still haven't found.

I would be most devastated if I lost the texts of the many lectures I have prepared over the years, which I constantly distribute electronically, revise and recycle, cut and paste into my other writing, etc. I have had such devastating data loss in the past and have had to rescan versions of these lectures in from hard copies.

My husband and I share a freeagent external hard drive (boy, it would be great to have my own!). The most valuable things I have on my computer are all our family photos. I've been pretty lucky not to lose much in terms of data, although I've have some close calls. Usually, I've just had to recreate docs from previous versions. It's a really pain.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
I don't have a notebook.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Yes, it was just lost.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

photos

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

no, thankfully that hasn't happened to me

I would be devastated if I lost all of my pictures, I have every picture of my 2 year old daughter on my computer.

I would be/am devastated over losing my Money files and my hundreds of photos of my family and friends. My hard drive just crashed TODAY and I am so sick to my stomach.

I would be most devastated to lose my music – both purchased and composed.

My wedding and honeymoon pictures

I work for my mom, and we recently lost ten years of information, including our entire customer database and all of our financial records! And as a photography studio, we would also be devastated if we lost ANY photographs! Maybe a new hard drive would convince my mom to start backing up data!

I would hate to lose photos, they can't be replaced. Thankfully I haven't lost anything yet! Thanks for the contest!

I would be devastated the most, if I lost my kids photos. I would also be devastated if I lost our financial info. Thanks so much for this giveaway. I'd really love to win this. Great prize. Thanks.

My WORK. And yes, i just lost it :(

I would be devastated if I lost any of our family pictures.

My receipts and current projects are most important. I've lost data from failing hard drives. Rebuilding from scratch is no fun!

family pix

I couldn't even get the computer to boot up I had a business and nearly had a panic attack. I lost everything and had to start over.

seagate 1

Pix and music. It would be a real pain to have to re download the music. I keep saying I am going to move stuff from my laptop to one of my desktops, but have not gotten around to it.

I would probably cry if I lost all of my music. Some of the songs I have are pieces I have performed at various music camps. In a few songs I have solos and the feeling I get from listening to the music and reliving the moments in performance can never be recaptured.

I have actually lost a few of my songs. One of them was a performance evaluation piece in which I had a major solo. I had freaked out about it at each rehearsal and just nailed it in performance. I miss hearing that song. I probably listened to it 3 times a week.

All the family pictures are on the computer.

I have a lot of academic work and a database of contact addresses for work that I would be devasted to lose. I broke a physical hard drive by dropping a laptop once, and lost a lot of academic work that I never was willing to pay to recover.

Pictures and videos of my family.

can you use this for regular pc's? i would be devastated if i lost my wedding pics. i've lost a couple of word docs. i didn't do anything about it. i just kinda sat there.

My computer crashed and I thought I lost everything. It cost me a lot of money to send it to a recovery center and they were able to restore everything but my pictures. I was heartbroken. I had to get in touch with friends and family to get as many pictures as possible from them and still a lot were missing.

I would be heartbroken if I lost all of my music, most of it was purchased digitally.

I've been really lucky that I've never had a major data loss.

I've lost photos before and it sent me into a 6 week depression. Thousands of irreplaceble photos, gone. Poof. I also have some other files that would be a real pain if I lost them.

Just the photos, but I usually have them posted on websites or uploaded to snapfish so I can at least get a smaller version of the pictures in a lesser quality.

My personal photos and videos.

I have photos and music. Havent lost them yet.

I don't, actually.

1. My work, Future Project Plans
2. Photographs
3. Music

My music! I have been collecting those songs forever!

Quotes for clients

I would hate to lose my photos and chatlogs from middle and high school - with my crummy personal memory, they're all I've got :P

I've only lost data by way of forgetting where it was on an old PC before migrating over and by corrupted CD-Rs. Neither case was devastating, but it's sad to know that I'll never get any of it back.

It would just kill me to lose photos and home videos. I store them on DVDs at irregular intervals. Thank goodness I haven't been wiped out yet.

I don't have a notebook (yet) but I would hate to lose my pictures.

i would be totally upset if i lost the pictures on my computer, some are invaluable and i would cry a lot. others are letters and business related matters too.

WOULD LOVE THIS FOR PHOTOS OF MY GRANDCHILDREN

legal docs and yes, computer crash

I would be really upset if I lost my photos!!

I would be devastated if I lost all of my working files. It would be a pain to start from scratch on everything.

I've lost all of them once before and since then I've learned that living in the cloud is useful, but its much quicker to have a local copy of everything.

Lost data is the byword of the age. And with jpeg's and videos, a few hundred Gigs won't do. Give me Terabytes, baby.

On my notebook is a large amount of emails from customers detailing the problems and issue they have asked me to resolve for them. So far, I have not lost important data, but I know I should do better back-ups than what I do now just using a flash drive.

i have so many photo's that i would be devastated if i lost.

my old laptop crashed and could not be restored so i have already lost about 400 photo's. i should have learnt my lesson, but simply cannot afford a spare hard drive

Haven't lost anything yet, that is why I need this win...

I've not lost anything yet however I don't really
have any "can't live without" files or anything on my laptop - It would be inconvenient if I ever lost my bookmarks

I have literally thousands of pictures of my adorable grandson that I couldn't stand losing.

I don't have a backup plan.

I am writing a book, It would be impossible to recover all that material if I lost it. Luckily I have not lost anything yet, but I need a backup!

I don't have a laptop but my daughter keeps all her information on the hard drive of her computer. If I won I would give her the drive so that she can save her documents and not lose them.

I have pictures from some of my travels around the world that I would be devastated if I lost.

I lost around 3000 photos after my first trip to Okinawa Japan and it would have been easy to just back them up on an external if I had known what that was.

I don't have a notebook, but I've lost data before. I had to rewrite an English paper.

Recently had a hard drive fail. Had exported the data when it started sounding bad, so got lucky and didn't lose my data. Would really be upset about losing family pictures.

I would be devestated if I lost all of my photos, both professional and personal. While they are backed up on my secondary laptop hard drive and on my desktop computer, it still would hurt badly. Those are the only truly unreplaceble items (besides email backups) that I have.

I have lost data before, but I had some help in recovering most of it using a recovery program. It just took forever to resort through all the mess. Imagine having to manually change file extentions on thousands of files that you knew were images, but they were either JPG, TIFF or RAW!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
School documents and photos + videos

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Yes. I did a re-installation of windows and forgot to backup some of my photos.

Q: What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

A: If my notebook ever crashed the most important things that I would loose would be some minor documents for school, some of my C++ projects, and some of my company's records.

Surprisingly this has never happened to me, but it did to my friend. I don't know the whole story, but his laptop's hard drive just went bad and lost EVERYTHING! It was not a good thing. He had to pay $$$$ to go to a computer repair shop and recover his data.

I was lucky for now (knocking on wood) and when my HDD failed several times I always was able to recover it's content with some recovery software (even after formatting it!)...

I now bought a TabletPC and when i try to synchronize most of my improtant data between my PC/TPC/WM phone with Live Mesh and Dropbox I periodically have some data on my TPC which arent synchronized. Most of them are work related and it owuld be really bad if I lost them which is quite easy as normal notebook HDDs fail quite often and SSDs are too expensive as of now :(

it would be most horrible for me to loose the personal data: email profiles, instant messenger profiles + history, old cellphone backups, and personal files clipped from the web. some of it dated back to 1999. it's my life story, just thinking of loosing all that makes me feel bad.

i never really lost anything i couldn't recover as of yet (but i do know it's only a matter of time)

I would be torn if I lost all the music files I have written and recorded.

I recently had a 500 gig external hdd crash and I lost 10 gigs of family pictures, and around 200 gigs of music files. Luckily I actually have all the cds of the mp3 files I lost. What really tore me apart was losing some of the new material I had been working on, and the family pictures which I didn't get around to backing up since I had barely transferred them over.

I would hate to lose all my Graphic Arts files. I can't even count all the hours that I have put into my Photoshop and Illustrator files.
I lost data one time when one of my OLD external hard drives when bad. Thankfully I was able to recover a few of the files, but my Photoshop archive was gone.

I actually have over 100GB of backup games.
It would be definatly be sad if i lost them.

lol so much time and effort lost.

Well i have lost data by deleting them by
mistake etc SHIFT+DEL!!!!!
OMG CANT EVEN GET THEM BACK.
What happened was that i was deleting a
whole lot of useless data when i deleted
some system files.
I had to take REFORMAT the laptop
and lost all my data.
Didnt have much games back then.
Was very very sad :(

Hope i get chosen :)

i have all my movies and music and i have lost alot of stuff but only from poor renaming and organizing and accidental deletion

I can't afford a notebook :( But I have lost data on my pcs and have been very upset. I usually just reinstall windows or reformat, losing everything. I don't have a backup plan because I only have a 250GB HD! This would enable me to store an image for recovery

I have lots of family photos that i have taken over the years (im like the family's photographer! haha) I would go grazy if i lost them....

I have lost some songs from my previous hard drive and some important brushes that i had for a photoshop assignment i had a while ago...

I'm currently writing my PhD thesis (in Developmental Biology) so loosing my experimental data (embryo pictures, microarray data, clone and vector sequences, etc) and my Word documents from my notebook would be ... brutal - I actually dread even thinking about it. Loosing my music would also be bad, but not nearly as dramatic.
I have lost some data in the past, mostly due to formatting the hard drive without having backup all my data. But until now I've always been able to recover the most important bits. My most important loss however were some microscopy pictures that I had archived in a DVD+R which went bad - a lesson learned the hard way, I spent three weeks repeating the experiments and taking new pictures. Now I still archive older data on DVDs but always keep copies on a hard drive, which I find is much more reliable.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

The worst possible thing that I could lose would be my photography work. I've traveled worldwide with my notebook and camera, and have amassed a collection with thousands of my favorite pictures. It would be absolutely AWFUL to lose any one of those pictures. They all are so precious to me, and each has its own special memory and meaning. My photos, and hence my laptop, are a part of my life that I couldn't afford to lose.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I did lose all my data a few years ago on my old notebook - emphasis on old! Something went awry and the hard drive appeared to have melted. It was a disaster to say the least! I lost everything I had, including emails from way back, my music, and many of my photos. Luckily I wasn't investing too much of my data in my notebook at that time, but now that I am, I don't want to lose anything ever again!

I am a photography student, and have traveled to Africa and a few places in Europe. I would cry...a lot...if I lost those photos.

Two types of people: those who have lost data, and those who will. I'm the first type. My last notebook took a tumble off the couch onto a tile floor. Hard drive physically crashed – little hope of data recovery. I lost practically everything (except my photos, which were on an external drive at the time). A few weeks later a client asked if they could make a change to their brochures and order another couple thousand. I had to explain why it would take a week as I recreated the brochure from scratch. I also could only charged for 1 hour when the work was 5 or 6.

What do you have on your notebook that you'd be devastated if you lost?
I've backed up unbelievable amounts of .mp3s on my laptop's drive. The amount of hours I've spent ripping my CDs to listen to (for either ipod or just PC listening, and for backup purposes) is substantial. I have a 60gb drive, and I would estimate 50% of this is extremely important to me...between college word documents, uploaded pictures, the earlier mentioned mp3s, and tons of other random things, it would be terrible for me to lose them.
Important data being lost-
I'm fortunate enough to have never lost my most important data. I am UNfortunate enough to have had to pay a substantial amount of money to have bestbuy (never again) back up all of the information from a dead drive. More importantly, I waited days for them to finish this process, which was done, for some reason, by DVD NOT an external hard drive. It was a nightmare situation that cost me far too much money and time. I recently lost access to Windows and was able to use a boot disk w/ file manager to back up my most important files to a friend's external. Externals have saved me in the past! I need one for myself for the future.

I would be devastated if I lost my pictures. I love pictures and I don't know what I would do if I lost them.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Firstly, over 8 GB worth of pictures of family and friends... From weddings to graduations to birthdays... Secondly, over 5 years of school "work"

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
I did... My computer crashed... Which was replaced by a less than par laptop... Which also crashed resulting in a loss of TONS of files... Gladly... It happened when I didn't start college yet.

My ongoing 3 year “project” constituting over 320 MS Word files, 54 PowerPoint presentations, and over 1000 images and music files. I am of course talking about my collegiate career so far!

I lost photos, and it sucks!!!

I upload some stuff encrypted to my home server (HTPC) and to my websever, but an external drive it on of the best options!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

photos, old journal scans, journals

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

Back when we were using windows 3.1 somehow we burned the data to a cd-rom after the computer crashed. Since then we've stayed backed up on MO drives and now a tiny external hard drive.

If I get this 1TB drive and 500G drive I'll also back up all our about-to-scratch favorite BBC DVDs.

I would be devastated if I lost my work. I run an indie record label. Among the normal personal stuff I have multi-track audio projects, audio mastering projects, cover art and POS design projects, multiple web sites, video projects, and tons more things I can't even recall right this minute in my post-Thanksgiving and Black Friday fog. I've been lucky not to have lost anything major so far, because I do back up my data. But a larger drive (or two) would definitely rock.

I and my wife would be devastated if we lost her research papers(Graduate) that are due in December.
Three years ago my Dell notebook's HDD crashed just a day before my Chemistry research paper was due. I didn't have any hard copies. Yes! I was screwed and I had to do it all over again.

I would be devastated if I lost all my photos. I've digitized tons of ancient photos from my parents' days, and those memories can never be replaced. I also have tons of pet photos, snapshots of moments that can't be recreated.

I have actually never lost data before, due to my backup habits. I'm just that good.

I would be devastated if I lost my Pictures. You can recreate documents and other things. You can't recreate the past.

I lost data once. My drive died on my MacBook Pro with no warning signs. I didn't have a recent backup and my backups were scattered on multiple smaller drives. It took a long time to recreate my data and I only got about 75% back. Pictures are what I missed the most.

I would be devastated if I lost my recordings for my bands...or my Flash toons I'm working on.

Personally, I haven't lost any data, but my brother's girlfriend's camera decided to erase her SD card once...Luckily, I pulled up some freeware file recovery software (Restoration) and got all the pictures back.

Photos...lots of them. A few of these I have spent hours on learning some of the photoshop techniques I wanted to use to enhance my work. All photos have memories, but some truly can never be replaced.

As a semi-professional photographer, my pictures would be the greatest loss of all.

I've had catastrophic HD failure before. It is not pretty. That's why I try to keep an adequate supply of HD's around to back-up to. (DVDs just don't cut it any more with over 200GP of pictures.) The problem is, I need to keep getting bigger and bigger HDs as my data expands. One of these drives would go a long way to curing my ails! ;-)

I would cry like a little kid who lost their lollypop if the last four years of my life (pictures, projects and documents) stored on my laptop was destroyed!

I would be devastated if I lost my photos, music files and/or some old documents. I lost a bunch of it a few years ago. I had all important data copied over 2 IDE disks, but a mainboard failure destroyed data on both disks.

I use a USB thumb drive for important docs. If I lost those docs -- ughh!!! This would definately help.

I would be devastated if I lost my music collection from my notebook. I currently have close to 40GB of music and it would take years to redownload it all over again. Luckly I haven't lost anything (yet!).

It would be sweet to win a hard drive from you guys!

Well...My Pictures, Database Backups & My Hand Histories (for texas hold'em), Music, Movies, Lots of Ebooks, some software waiting to being installed later, emails (archived ones as well)...So all this Could be lost if any happened with my laptop or its harddrive..

V.i.k.t.o.r

I have quicken and quickbooks data on my laptop. Also photos, music, and a lot of personal files written over the last 20 years. I have lost some of the data before. I only had an out of date backup, so I didn't get everything back.


Right now I use JungleDisk to backup what I can, but there is just too much data to backup given my slow upsteam.

I have family pictures. I'd feel sad if I lost my music, work files, pictures and videos. But I wouldn't feel devastated. I learned from past data losses not to get too attached to my data.
I KNOW!
Also, I don't have to save critical data on my laptop.

If I lost my family pictures and videos, my life would drastically change.

I haven't lost anything big, but the "opportunity" to redo lost presentations has never been high on my excitement list.

I would be devastated of losing all my old photos and documents. I lost an old hard drive long ago and with it lost tons of music and documents.

I would be devastated if i lost my photo raw files.

I Have a lot of Music,Videos,Movies,Softwares,eBooks etc., and i dont have a backup as of now since the 250GB External drive isnt enough to backup around 960GB of data, so this would really do a magic for me.

P.S : Good Luck to all the participants :d

Very good question… I’ve lost things before, but have recovered them. Nowadays, I use LaCie and Seagates to backup my stuff. Works Wonders!

My laptop was stolen recently and my backups were a little... shall we say, out of date.

So I can say from experience that losing my client files and pictures was the most devastating.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

My photos and my docs. My work's life is safe thanks to GitHub :)

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I lost an HD with many many many loved old photos some years ago ... I'm sad re-thinking about that :(

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
=Most important, all of my photos.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
= Gone forever, but not forgotten....

I would be devasted if I lost a clients work. I'm a graphic designer and you can spend hours if not days working on projests. This happened to me two years ago when my iMac had a hard drive failure in the middle of a print job. I had to drag out my old machine, which is slow and start again. A very late night and I now never work without the safetly net of a backup.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Personal documents and photos.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Of course. :) Only part of that I had on some DVDs, but the rest was lost for good.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
-My music. some of them I don't have the original CDs anymore =/

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
-Again, my music. It was years ago and thankfully I had the original CDs at that time for most of them.

Hi before I start I want to tell you that I´m from El Salvador and I'm at Indianapolis on vacations buy I really like here so if I will try my best to make me clear, because my english isn´t perfect.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Wow, I would say that all my university work, because I have a lot of projects and research that are very important to me. And my pictures because I have a lot and all of them bring me good memories.

Have you ever lost important data, what happened?
Yes, once I lost a big document of a university project, and I went crazy, for minutes I thought that I was done, but then I thought that was better to do something, so I did what I could, anyway I win something of that grade but wasn´t even close of what I would obtain if I didn´t lose my files.

Currently, I have my website backups, and losing those would be somewhat devastating. But not having a backup of my system itself is probably the worst part since it'd quite tedious to have everything running as it is right now.

Several years ago, a hard drive I had died and I lost all my data. The good part about that is that it forced me to upgrade my system, but it wasn't fun to start from zero.

I have PDFs of letters written to me by my aging fifty six year old father with heart failure, telling me what to do in the event of his death, which are crucial to me. I'm the last link biological link to his side of my family; everyone on his side has died, excluding me. I'm biologically an only child. After my mom and dad divorced, my mom remarried and had a child with my stepdad, but he doesn't have the same DNA as my biological father, so I am the last link to that side of the family. Without these files, I'd lose a big link to him, seeing as the original letters were destroyed several years ago in a flood. (Thank goodness I had the bright idea of backing them up digitally!)

Back when I had a PC, there was a power problem that damaged my desktop's hard drive, somehow managing to get through the surge protector I had. These files were files of my stepbrother as a baby. Fortunately, my step dad had them backed up, so they weren't permanently lost to the ether.

I'd be devastated if I lost all my personal digital photos that store on my computer.

I would be devastated if I lost my music collection and/or my photos, specifically my photos from Costa Rica (most beautiful place in the world). Additionally, I use a Mac, and Time Machine is an invaluable tool.

As far as lost data, I used to use a PC notebook. Senior year of college, it crashed. I lost most of my essays, assignments and writing samples from undergrad in the crash.

I have a 260 Gig WD that's running out of space now. It would be great if I win one of these bad boys. I have too much to lose if i don't back up

I would be devastated if I lost my photos. I have never personally lost information, however, I know people who have lost all their family photos and music.

I love free things!

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Company payroll!


Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I have been a victim of a virus that corrupted the partition table on my hard drive. I lost all my files and I had to totally start from scratch.

If I lost my home movies and vacation videos, I would be devastated.

Last time I lost my data, I was thankful that I had a backup on my external Seagate backup drive.

Losing my vacation photos would be pretty painful. Luckily I use Time Machine to backup regularly. Yes, I have lost data to an HD failure. It was not pleasant.

I’ve definitely lost some data before, back in the days when I did CD-R backups. Now I backup all important files to an external hard drive, and have most (if not all) text files in the cloud with Google Docs. Keep copies of all my photos on Picasa Web Albums, videos on Youtube or Google Video, and for random other files I’ve tried online storage like box.net, and that and similar sites seem to work decently as well.

I'd be devastated if I lost all my music and photos, plus all my assignments and projects, plus other work I've done. I've never had a drive crash on me *knocks on wood* but I see it all the time at work and it makes we wish I backed stuff up regularly.

I'd be devastated if I lost all of my Final Cut projects. Thankfully, I've never lost anything important—yet.

I make 5 copies of my photos!!!

I'd be devastated if I lost my music, photos, works of art, and school/personal documents. Last time I lost data was about 10 years ago, and it really made me upset that I lost most of it.

I would be devastated if my drive failed because I would lose my digital life. I have all of my documents, music, pictures, videos, and pretty much anything digital in one place. I'm a web developer, so I would also lose all my code and documents I need to get my work done.

What would I lose with my macbook?

my soul!

do you know where I can download a new one? ;-)

On my laptop, I have copies of photos and my FLAC encoded music. My photos are uploaded to Flickr and burned to DVD, and I have the original CDs. I'd have to re-rip the CDs which would be a pain in the butt...

If I lost important data I'd be gutted. Thankfully it hasn't happened.... yet...

I’ve lost all my music a few times, the first when I used mainly iTunes it wasn’t so bad but then I lost most of it again and had to get what I had from old ipods and friends who had my cd’s and stuff like that.

it was really annoying, and I try to backup but the harddrive I have is running out of space and I have no money to buy another.

I’m mainly afraid for my photos though, the only backup I had was an ipod, which had its harddrive fail a few weeks ago.

By the grace of the spinning platters, I've never lost any data but I'd be devastated if anything happened to my photos or FACS or microscopy data!

I like to write a lot, whether its song ideas, or something that just came to me and I needed to write it down. Usually they go in my notebook.
To me those things are priceless and it would be horrible if I lost them.

A few years ago I had this stubborn mindset and believed my hard drive would never quit on me, I had a colleague who would nag me about backing up and I always said I'd do it later, and never did. One day I caved to his persistence and when I got home from purchasing a 160gb external drive, the drive in the notebook had already failed. :(
1TB would be great for time machine on my mac notebook though!

I would be devastated if I lost my school work/notes, photos, and music.

I've been lucky enough to never lose any data.

Hi,
I learnt in the hard way to backup my digital art collection (10 years of my work) after a fire...

Yep, there is not enough backups :)
Good day 2 all!
Roy.

I am an author. I would be devastated if I lost any of my manuscripts in a crash. I actually keep most of my really important work on a jump drive but I did lose that once. Not a crash just an absent-minded where did I put that. I was in a panic! I had some but not all of my work.

I'd love a backup drive!

I would be feeling quite suicidal if I lost all the various videos I collected over the years. They range from anything like the 2008 Olympics Beijing Welcomes You promo video to school project videos and high quality versions of Yale's online courses. The reason they're so important is that I add subtitles (which take enormous amounts of time to add) and release them back to the public. I keep a separate folder for my karaoke effects, which are the pride and honor of every subber.

I once had to do an immediate reformat on my old Toshiba (dang you rootkit) and I lost over half of my research project and video. It wasn't really devastating if you looked at it in retrospect, but ugh that was hell when 2 months of work was due in 2 days.

We have many many short videos of our two year old daughter. they are just sitting on my computer not backed up anywhere. I'd be devastated if we lost them. A few years ago my wife lost an entire documentary project of her now deceased grandmother. It was edited and mixed and the drive died. it was crushing. I've learned to try and back up everything, but all I can do right now is burn suff to 4.2GB DVDs. Not a terribly elegant solution.

Where do you begin? These days everyone stores everything on hard drives; our pictures, music, documents. Then there is my research.

Have lost data several times. Some of the times no backup was made so that was a bummer. Some there were CD/DVD backups. But we all know how tedious and time-consuming that can be, don't we?

I'd be devastated if I lost all the photos i have on my laptop since 4 years ago. I've had so many memories on here that losing it would be losing a part of my life. I have lost a laptop once (my previous one) and was not only depressed for a week but also realized that what I needed was a backup harddrive :) in case of these unfortunate events. You can't buy happiness with money, but you can help it from being lost.

I would obviously be devastated if I lost all of our pictures. That is a given. I would also be upset to lose all of the music that I have painstakingly moved over from CDs over the past 5 years.
So far I have been lucky as far as losing anything. Have helped people who lost stuff, but for myself (knock on wood) so far so good.

Hmm...I would be devastated if I lost all of my ex-girlfriends' pictures!

I mean, memories are nice, but having photos is priceless :S

I lost them already once *gulp* about one year ago, when I used "this" program to defragment my mac (Didn't need it but I was young and a noob :/), and it ended up with me having to reinstall the entire system again :P
Needless to say, I now keep several copies of my important data (On flash USBs though...)

That hard drive would be nice having ^_^

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

For me the most devastating would of course be the thousands pictures I have taken of/with family and friends and places I have been to and the gigabytes of video I have recorded. That is something I just cannot get back if I were to lose them all, its gone, I can't recreate that, I can't go back in time and even if I could it would be a lot of work to go retake myself in photos and videos. Music I can rip back to my hard disk, documents, not so detrimental but still would be a hurtful lost (I currently try and back up the most important to Windows Live Skydrive, doing everything would take a weeks and I am naturally lazy) but its the digital content that matters most and thats Pictures and Videos.

Winning one of these would be a significant upgrade right now, here's why:
On my Dell Dimension 8300 250 GB disk its partitioned:
C: Primary disk - Windows XP Professional 187 GB with 55.4 GBs of free space
F: WINNT - running Windows 7 Ultimate 8.16 free of 25.0 GB
I: NT6SRV - running WIndows Server 2008 Standard 6.99 GB free of 20.6 GB

My backup strategy for this computer is pretty much non-existent right now. I have the pictures,
documents, software programs, pictures and tonnes of music copied on the external in addition to the my Complete PC backup for the Dell Inspiron 1500 on that same external drive, space has become cramped. I would love to be able do a Complete PC backup of the desktop to save myself the trouble of having to reinstall the operating systems (please note plural) if the system were to go south. I also have about 10 Virtual PC .VHD files in my documents on C:, these too are not so detrimental, but man, recreating back everything would be a chore.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I can recall one devastating memory back in August of 2001. In March of 2000, my dad had gotten an IBM Aptiva for his office (Windows 98 SE, 10 GB HD). When school was over I would stop by his Office to use the free net and type documents in MS Word he dictated. Over the months going into 2001, a lot of documents were typed and hundreds of email sent and received in Outlook Express. In March of 2001,my aunt bought a copy of Windows ME which I immediately upgraded to from Windows 98 SE on the IBM Aptiva. (Please don't assume its a story about Windows ME causing data loss, its not) Anyway, everything was going well, we had also upgraded from an old version of Norton that came with the Aptiva to Norton Antivirus 2001. Everything was going well for the next few months, it was also my last year of high school. During the summer I spent a huge amount of time at the Office on that PC. All that time surfing the net was fun, but I didn't do certain things right. That same summer, I forced my Dad to get a copy of Windows 2000 Professional because of the reliability improvements that were touted.

July, I did a dual boot between ME and Windows 2000 Professional using FAT32 as the file system, but 2000 was installed on the same drive within a folder I created called WIN2K. Everything was going well, dual booting between 2000 and ME. One day when I stopped at the Office, my dad said
andre, somethings wrong with the PC when it boots up (2000 default) it keeps showing this message inconsistency with disk or something like that. I booted up the Aptiva into 2000 and during the boot sequence CHKDSK was initiated saying inconsistency with disk and its trying to repair it. I thought, strange, but it booted into 2000 just fine, desktop shows up, no issues. But that CHKDSK error kept bothering me.

We had data on both sides, with the most data in Windows ME, it was basically like transitioning. So, I rebooted, and this time I entered Windows Millenium. Then I got the CHKDSK sequence, with ME checking the volume for errors. Hmm, I started to wonder and worry. Eventually, it booted to the desktop, but it was in a 256 colors. I thought to myself, what was happening here? We left it until the next day when I carried the Windows ME disk to see if I could do a repair installation. I booted from the disk but during setup, it said I cannot install the OS because there might be a virus on the system and suggested I do a scan with my Antivirus. I thought,

WOW, a virus, 's***'. I exited setup, opened Norton 2001 and ran a full system scan, found the virus, couldn't remove it, rebooted in safe mode on ME and ran the full scan, still couldn't remove it. I know that the name of the virus was WORD97/W32 or something like that. I thought to myself, what the hell am I going to do?!?! I thought, ok, maybe I could just uninstall Windows ME since that was an option in AD/Remove Programs and it would remove the OS along with the virus. The uninstall went well, but when I booted back to 98 it was the same 256 colors, which meant it was the same virus still lurking. I didn't feel good inside. I booted into 2000 and everything seemed ok, the desktop was 32 bit colors. What happened next was the worst decision I ever made in computing. I took the IBM Aptiva Restore disk out of the box to see if this would do a repair installation and fix the problem. I was thinking, hey, maybe it will detect the Windows 98 installation and repair it. Ok, I booted from the Aptiva Disk and which had like a BSOD DOS screen. Then the installation began, then I saw reinstalling IBM software, then I saw formatting drive, then I saw installing Windows 98 SE, then I saw register for IBM support, then I saw a brand new Windows 98 desktop, then I opened My Documents and there were no documents, then I opened Outlook Express and I only got prompt to create an account. That weird cold sweat feeling came over. I rebooted, thinking and hoping maybe I would see the Windows 2000 Professional, uh, there was no Windows 2000, no boot entry. Now, I'm thinking, where could those documents have gone and my dads emails. I opened the C: drive, no documents there, nothing. The worst part was yet to come and that was explaining to my dad, all his personal files and email were gone. Yes, he was angry, but he didn't kill me. I realize I was naive with what I had done. Probably what I should have done was copy everything over from 98 to Windows 2000 and upgraded Windows 2000 from FAT32 to NTFS, but I just didn't know how to do those things at the time. What could have also done was to use some floppies and back up as many word documents as possible and copy them to my computer at home. It would have taken a long time, but at least, I would have had some of his data backed up. Eventually, I said dad, we need to invest in a CD-Burner and all was well again - for now.

I would hat to loose all my pictures, and maybe even more importantly all the software projects I have on my HD.

I had a hard drive failure many years ago, and I lost everything on that drive. I had a few small writing projects on it, so that really destroyed me, although I was a kid. I now use time machine to backup, although since it is in a noisy server, i don’t backup as much as I should. I have a Mac so if you choose me that would be great!

devastated if you lost: PHOTOS.

lost important data: Lucky (not YET).

Certainly photos, (first and foremost), and secondly email. I delete my email from the server after a day, and I maintain a copy of my important correspondence.

I did have a hard drive that went physically bad, and there was no way to recover my data. Very frustrating experience.

I've lost several laptops and their data when they just quit working -- usually a hard drive problem, so I couldn't just pull the drive and copy it. A backup like this would be awesome insurance...

I would freak out completely if I just lost one little file of all the files I have on my macbook. I'm like Scrooge McDuck, I know every little coin in my warehouse full of money. Except I only have files and no money like Scrooge McDuck.

I'd love to have a system to backup my data. I'm in high school, and I really want to save all of my work. I know that this well give me a sense of protection, and with this prize, and I can use this well into college.

I would be lost if I lost my graduate work and all the pictures of my family. I lost most of my undergraduate work when a drive failed.

I would die if I lost my 150 Gb of photos. If a picture is worth a thousand words and each picture is worth 5 Mb... thats a lot of memories I would be devastated to lose.

I would be devastated if i lost my games, photos, works of art and music.

I have all of my kids baby photos and videos on one drive and I need a back up solution now! I once lost data from a drive that had years of photos. The most recent photos on that drive included the photos from a rare family visit, and my engagement vacation. I hope to never lose data again!

I frequently have photos in my laptop that, while I'm on the road, have no backup at all and I would be most unhappy to lose them.

I once lost two years of my filed income tax forms. They were the only copies I had. Not even hard copies. Fortunately I have not required them - yet.

I have a new iMac I haven't started backing up. It has all the kids accounts and if it crashed they'd be *all over me*. Best reason anyone will give, guaranteed!

I lost my entire harddrive- without backups- in 2004 on my old iMac G5 (first gen! didn’t even have a webcam). Shortly after that I cloned my drive every few months(!) to an external drive as I couldn’t really afford a external drive bigger than my internal.

Nowadays I backup an image of my documents/photos/movies folder every week to a 1TB TeraStation NAS. The images are encrypted with PGP Desktop before storage as anyone who wardrives into my Wifi would be able to login to the TeraStation (they have really, really crappy access control). Incremental backups of my Documents folder is done hourly to the 50gb Backup user provided by my webhost. The method of my upload is simple: SFTP via Expandrive so that it’s mounted as a disk.

P.S.- My webhost, Dreamhost, provides a 50gb amount of diskspace entirely for personal use that isn’t redundantly backed up by them. They provide you with 5tb of overall bandwidth so I don’t think I’ll ever run past that. On top of that reliable (in my experience!) hosting with a huge (500gb) of disk space all for $10 a month.

I've spent most of my money on technology and travel. I think I would be devastated to lose the photos and music collections I've built up, collections that contain my travel experiences.

I almost lost all of my data recently. The first time I caught it in time and was able to do a backup to a new drive (the backup drive had failed recently too).

Prevention is better than the cure! Save and prevent the cure!

Nothing. I don't have a notebook and my wife's pc is not worth backing up.

I had my laptop stolen over last Thanksgiving. All of my family photos and document were gone. I'm still realizing how many photos are missing.

I don't want this to ever happen again, neither does she! :)

I would be devastated if I lost my photos and my music. I also would be unhappy if I lost my master's thesis, which will be my starting point for my PhD thesis. I could never recreate all that work.

Recently i suffer a lot of bad moments, first my IMac stop working, that occurs about 5 months ago, and since then i've not been enable to read anything from the hard drive. I was told that it'll be repair by the second week of December. (I really hope so)

Also i had a 15" Mac Book Pro, that was stolen from my work!!! (incredible but true)

Last, my Home PC also suffer an incident with the video card... I not have to say that i have all my precious moments on all that computers: photos, videos, emails, documents, files, etc... Anyone that has kids will know the amount of files in photos and videos that parents make...

I really dont want to lose any more files...

I NEED storage.......iTunes music is taking over my life...

I'd be devastated if I lost my Safari bookmarks! I've been to many sites that deserve repeat visits and I'd hate to never see them again.

Thankfully I've never lost data, but an external would ensure that!

I would be most certainly devastated if I lost all of the pics of my beautiful 3yr old daughter. Precious moments are hard to get back, period.

Like most people, I keep most of my life on my computer - videos, pics of family, important documents, resumes, etc. I'd be pretty devastated if I lost it all. After my old notebook motherboard died a year ago (stupid HP pavilion), I was able to get an external enclosure and rescue my hard drive data - phew! I've been pretty religious about backing up regularly ever since, but I definitely need another back up drive, since my current one is almost full.

As for lost data, I was dumb enough not to back up my work computer (I was a grad student in a lab, and it was a "general use" office computer) and one of my lab mates moved the machine to use for an experiment and of course, he dropped the cpu box - bye bye data. I was pretty cranky for a while after that......

Once i lost my entire data because i could access to my hard drive. There were my college stuff in there and i had to redo it again so i try to recover but it didn't happen. So winning this competition would give me two hard drive so i can backup my important data.

Wow nice contest.Thanks a lot Xavier.
__________________________________________________

1.What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Ans :- My most precious things on my notebook would be my Emails & tons of Text files which i'm keeping with me for years & i would certainly be devastated if they get corrupted or lost by any chance.


2.Have you ever lost important data- what happened
?

Ans :- Many times.I get attacked by viruses sometimes even though i'm using pretty good security softwares.Few weeks ago i had to format two drives of my HDD because of two nasty viruses & i had to loose quite important official documents on those drives.

I once lost my entire hard drive to an erasure. I had to purchase recovery software, and spent the next 2 day recovering stuff. I learned the hard way.

I (knock on wood) almost never have anything on my MacBook which can't be lost, unless I'm traveling. Digital pictures would be the most important thing, but they always live on multiple spindles until I can get them copied to our server.

I've lost some data, but I'm usually pretty good about backing things up.

i dont even have a notebook!! cant afford it , but i lost once already all my photos and music, plus my starter portfolio for designs :(

http://www.justinjacob.com/

I would be devastated if I lost my trip photos and work files. Being in the IT biz, I know the importance of backing up, backing up, and backing up again. Redundancy is king, as you have exhibited, Xavier, and a great insurance policy to boot. I always use my brother for an example of the downside of trusting your drive because "it's never failed before." He learned the hard way, after I set him up with a backup system which he never saw fit to use, and his drive with all of his business correspondence failed, and could only be recovered by forensic specialists for a $1500 fee; a small price to pay for his valuable info, but a needless one at that.

I have about two months worth of memories within video, pictures, and even audio recordings, it was at the Philippines where I met my cousins and even caught a palm tree with branches. I still laugh at our audio conversations we had because my camera couldn't catch anything in the dark, it would be more than devastating if I had lost them, that's almost a thousand dollar trip, priceless memories, and more importantly my video project down the 1's and 0's drain.



Unfortunately, I did lose important data, and said data it what you read above. Apparently, my harddrive got roughed up during it's transport back to the U.S, I was editing a movie during my free time and it was going to be their priceless present Christmas surprise, instead I ended up buying expensive U.S food and candy. You should have seen their hype brought down, what really felt devastating was having to explain a surprise that was never going to happen.

I bought a new waterproof camera recently and the picture quality is amazing. I've taken some great pictures of good times with friends in places I was previously too scared to take my camera. Right now I don't have a reliable backup solution eventhough I've been stung twice when I suffered accidental loss and a hard drive failure (bye bye dissertation and my sisters wedding photos). Winning this competition would avoid a repeat of past disasters and allow me to hold onto my data and precious pictures for years to come.

I would be devastated if I lost all my music and pictures, a lot of the pictures are only saved here, and my music would be really hard to replace because of the way its organized.

I recently lost all my favorites when switching from firefox to chrome to firefox again, and Im still upset to the day


-Dima

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Right now I have a combination of photos of the first two years of my oldest son's life as well as the first three months of my youngest. If I lost those, I'm pretty sure my wife wouldn't let me make any more babies with her.

Also, I am a teacher so I have all of my prepared lesson plans and materials. Its my first year teaching so these lessons are crucial. Maybe I need to back them up whether I win or not.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

Since the day that my wife and I met, I've managed to crash beyond repair three of our computers. I don't know how but, I did it. What that means is that I've lost most of the photos and music that we took or enjoyed in college. The photos from our honeymoon... gone.

funny, but your wife would be totally justified

I edit video and am currently making a documentary. I would be absolutely devastated if that went and 6 months of my life went down the drain.

As a writer, I lost one of my favorite stories. Gone forever.

I would be devastated if I lost scientific data on my computer from work. Also baby photos.

I've lost data before from transfers, but I think the most devastating is from program crashes that loses the last 30 min of work and I realize I need autorecovery more often.

If I lost my years of portfolio work, I would cease to exist.

I once lost 3,500 photos from a 4 day NYC photo shoot I did as a sophomore in college. It was easily my best work, gone, forever. The lighting for 4 days was perfect in every setup I did.

Tip: Magnets and hard drives, NOT best friends.

I've been scanning my family's old picture slides into my notebook, which date back to 1966! If I lost these precious pictures of the family's most important moments in time, I would be devastated, along with my family. A backup drive is exactly what I need to save these memories. Don't let these lost memories be on your conscience!

I would be devastated if I lost my music library, my school projects, and my pictures.

One time I accidentally deleted all my videos on my cell phone. I never saw them again.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Family photos, documents, my music.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
Yes. I turned on my laptop and it said it couldn't load up windows. Could only recover some data.

There's definitely the traditional photos, video, family mementos and that ilk on my MacBook's harddrive – it'd be horrible to lose any of it, for sure. But I think even more painful to endure would be losing all of the random thoughts and ideas, brainstorms and rough drafts from the past five or ten years – since when I was in Jr. High – that have collected there from many eons of late nights and too much caffeine. They may be horrible ideas, with no value whatsoever, but I'd hate to lose them.

The thing I would miss the most would be the videos I've made. There's more to a video than what the viewer sees. I have *hours* of video footage that I would be devastated if I lost.

That, and all my tweaked settings.

I make flash websites and I can only afford the web space to hold the .swf files. Therefore, if my hard drive crashed and I lost the actual .fla files, I'd cry - and then spend weeks and weeks reinventing the wheel. I also make promotional videos for bands, and if I lost all of the videos, I would no longer have the final cut files to work with. I have a crappy 250GB drive now, but could really use a new one as that space is all filled.

I lost my MacBook in a house fire a couple of weeks ago. Wish I had a back-up of that sucker, live and learn I guess.

My notebook contains so much valuable information, I can't begin to imagine what would be the worst to lose. Most likely, my file containing heavily encrypted passwords and possibly my photos would be the most valuable. I have previously lost all this data, but after a couple days worth of work, I was able to recover my data since the issue was simply a problem between operating systems. Since then I have felt the pressing need for a backup drive but have been unable put that purchase at the top of my long list...

My iBook G4 was stolen a little over a year ago. I lost everything on my hard drive, however tiny (40GB). I would be most devastated if I lost my photos and address book contacts of all my friends and family.

I have a lot of pictures from my various trips and I would be devastated if I lost any of them.

I had a hard drive crash before. The master file allocation file got damaged, but I was able to rebuild it and recover my data.

Now I've got music and school documents on my laptop that I have to keep backed up. I've had my fair share of laptop hard drives crash on me and I've lost weeks of vacation photos, music, and school work.

I love this site from the depths of my soul.

I have a ton of data on my mac that would be terrible if it was lost.

I have:
Around 2000 photos
A large itunes music library
Many iTunes video's and tv shows (worth a lot of money)
Many school documents

A large backup harddrive would be great

I'm currently programming for the iPhone and I have all have my ideas and apps on my Macbook. I have too many hours to count worth of work on that internal hard drive.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Countless personal photographs and movies.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

I've lost photos and school work with a corrupted hard drive. I tried for several days to recover the data to no avail.

1000's of lines of computer code, days of music, and many hours worth of University related work.

Luck has been on my side and have lost nothing yet.

It would be horrid if I lost all my schoolwork and college essays.

It happened once before unfortunately when my computer mysteriously ceased to function.

15Gb of music: ~$3000
25Gb of shows, movies, and photos: ~$500
30Gb of software and projects: ~$1000
40Gb of past emails (aka leverage): priceless

Luckily so far I've always managed to back up what I need before losing access to it (either through system failure or parting ways with an employer). But it is getting to the point that DVD's are too small and my last portable drive has started getting unstable on me. So I am definitely due for something like this.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Photos, Music, documents-- Masters Thesis

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?
I did lose everything a few years back.
It was horrid. The biggest thing I lost were the photos. I was able to get the music back (lots of hours spent re-ripping CD's). But the Photos were Gone forever- Europe pictures, friends, college pix.... it stinks.

Backups are Very important- and I do tham all the time now.

Fortunately, essentially everything I have on my notebook is also on my desktop. Unfortunately, the converse isn't true, though it's mostly videos and music that can be replaced with enough time.

Photos are the biggest thing I would lose, but there are also things like family history/geneology and such that would be hard to gather up all the pieces into a single place again. Even simple things like bookmarks become a pain to find and organize after a crash.

I have had laptop hard drive crashes before, what a pain. Luckily I burn most of the data to DVD for recovery, though that is done very infrequently.

My personal photos and my works are my precious data

Probably personal photos and videos are number one for me when it comes to the importance of using a back up drive. My computer hard drive recently died out on me but luckily I bought a portable drive. I would have cried if I lost it all.

Videos, Pictures & Screencaptures I've painstakingly created are the most painful things I could lose if my laptop hard drive died. Despite having about 3 external hard drives (250gb, 320gb and 500gb) for my desktop & laptop, I have lost data primarily because I took backing up for granted. In fact, my most recent data loss was on the 23rd where my last backup was over 1 month ago. Not cool especially as I use my laptop for work & personal work. So, I've pretty much committed to weekly backups now and running out of space really fast.

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

My pictures and music are backed up but what would be crushing if I lost is the program where I keep all of the notes that I have accumulated over the past 8 years. I use the notes an saved reference material in helping in security forums.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

My old Windows 95 machine has a hardware problem. Fortunately the local tech was able to recover the data.

I've had a notebook crash... lost everything I hadn't burnt to CDs which was quite a lot. Big Bummer!

> What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

Photos from a recent holiday, and a whole bunch of useful stuff like a web browser. (to read notebooks.com of course!)

> Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

No, but almost - I had a hdd fail (slowly) and I managed to get most of that data off, but I'm probably missing some stuff still.

On my notebook I have two years worth of lectures from the time I spent in school in Jerusalem which are the only copies that exist and thankfully I have yet to have a data loss on my machine

What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?
Family photos, work/school documents, personal documents and my music.

Have you ever lost important data- what happened? Oh yeah. Right in the middle of my first semester of business school my computer decided to die on me. I lost a number of files resulting in me scrambling to copy class notes and to completely rewrite a number of papers and documents. Needless to say, my grades could have been better that semester.

Thanks, Xavier

I'd be devastated if I lost my code, or school work.

I have yet to lose any data, but it's just a matter of time…

I have ALOT of things saved up from since I was in middle school; projects, pictures, essays, etc. I should probably back them up but have never gotten around to it..but they mean a lot to me, so I guess I would be pretty devastated.

Thank God I haven't lost any data yet...lol - and hopefully never :P

I'd probably be devastated if I lost my photographs. I just changed jobs and I miss all of my friends out east.

I haven't lost data yet. However, my first laptop's backlight died recently, so we're moving its contents over, piecemeal. It's exasperating.

Our desk computer just got wiped out with all our pictures of the kids, all the boyscout activities and a record toward our sons Eagle. A biography I was writing. I am not computer savii but we learnrd back up is vital.

I have lots of photos and personal files that I did not bother print out as there are too many. I will bevasteated if I lost them, so i am trying to get a backup soon.

Once I lost one of my MBA programe assigments that I need to submit. I had to to rewrite from an earlier copy that I saved. Lost of reseached information have to be retraced and re-written