OK, it's time to get personal here and confess that my friends don't listen to my advice about using secure offsite backup for data protection. In fact, they probably don't listen to any of my advice, but that's a whole other story. But now that one of them has experienced a catastrophic data loss, their eyes aren't glazing over before I even get the words "secure offsite backup" out of my mouth. I'm so sorry for my friend that I don't even have the heart to say, "I told you so."

Here's what happened. The friend, who owns a professional photography studio, recently lost 3 years' worth of digital photos when his hard drive crashed. Now, we're talking about a guy with a nice following of clients and thousands of photos -- senior portraits, wedding and engagement photos, baby pictures -- I think you get the idea. He was always too busy to deal with data protection (so he said), and had never researched the option of using secure offsite backup. His data backup practices were spotty, at best. Actually, he was very lucky this time, because he had already processed all the files from the wedding he just shot, and had sent them to the lab for printing. His reputation is still intact, but that's a pretty close call, don't you think? And he won't be able to fill requests for reprints from any of the files he lost