One copy is never enough

Fred bought an external HD about 6 years ago and over time he grew into the practise of carrying out all invoicing directly to the hard drive so that each night he could take it home from the business and access the files if needed whilst safeguarding his records in case someone got access to his office.
Sadly, one day not long ago, smoke leaked out from it.
On investigation it wasn't the power supply, and it wasn't the controller in the external case, it was the motherboard that was part of the hard disk.

In hindsight, Fred should have worked directly on the local HD in his computer, and with some simple backup software or just using windows explorer he could have transferrred the relevant files to the external HD each night. Fred has lost years of records and months of unpaid invoices.

We are all guilty of failing to do regular backups, we are all guilty of putting our faith in a single copy of important data on a (cheap) hard disk.  Hard disks do fail, and whilst I believe the mean time between failures for mechanical HD's is around 50,000 hours there are always some that will fail more quickly (and the new SSHDs are worse).

Get yourself an external hard disk, or if you prefer, a large capacity USB stick, make a copy of your important files, pictures, documents, etc. If your business relies on this data or documentation, buy 2 and alternate them, then you'll have a fallback in case of failure.  If you would like assistance automating the process, contact me.

IF YOU ONLY HAVE ONE COPY YOU WILL LOSE IT EVENTUALLY.