hindsight, noun
recognition of the realities, possibilities, or requirements of a situation, event, decision etc., after its occurrence.

I frequently get calls from customers distraught about their PC crashing. We all have heard or known someone that lost everything on their hard drive as a result of some unfortunate event that caused their hard drive or PC to fail. With today's world being the digital age it seems everything we do anymore is with or stored on a computer.
Computer components, like everything else, has a specific life span. Components are rated with MTBF, Mean Time Between Failure. MTBF is a rating used to predict reliability and failures. This rating is published by the manufacturer. I would compare it to car makers and their milage ratings... under ideal conditions and rarely will you ever get what they say. They rate with MTBF because no component lasts forever. They take a sampling of components and run them till they fail. They take the average time it took the components to fail and assign the MTBF. As an example, 1 may last 1 hour, another 100,000 hours. The MTBF would be 50,000 hrs. Did you just purchase the first one or second?

Computers fail. Hard drives fail. The cause of the failure can be hardware failure, viruses, electrical spikes, abuse, temperature, and many other reasons. What usually happens is you've lost everything you have stored on it... pictures, documents, email, video, etc.

BACKUPs, BACKUPs, BACKUPs. They have made it easy, even for the novice. The 2 most common ways are with external drives or online backup services.
External hard drives are getting real cheap. You can get a external USB terabyte drive for less than $100. You can buy the drive for much less than you would pay someone to try and recover your lost data. Most come with a backup program on the drive when you get it. You hook the drive up to your USB port, run the program and set up a automated backup. Simple. Cheap. If you really want protection, get 2 drives, keep one with your PC and put the other at another location. Trade them occasionally.
Some Online services also allow you to store data remotely. You download their backup software, follow the directions, and you can backup your data to a remote server that can be accessed from anywhere. Normally the free online backups only give you a limited amount of storage, like 2 gig. If you want more storage, they charge you a fee. www.mozy.com, www.dropbox.com , www.idrive.com. Here's a great article from wikipedia on online backup services.

Now back to hindsight... if a disaster happens to your data, and you didn't have a backup plan, you can only blame yourself. I have tried to give you a push to get your data backed up. If you ignore this, I would guess you are also one of those folks that don't have an up-to-date antivirus program, or you have a wireless router with no security. :)