My hard drive finally crashed. Why do I say "finally"? Because, as I’ve been told a thousand times, with a hard drive it is not a question of IF it will crash; it is simply a question of WHEN.

Yes, kiddies, your hard drive will crash. "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life," to mimic old Bogie in Casablanca.

Because I’m on the web driving my drives at racetrack speed for 16 hours a day, mine wear out faster than most. You’d think I’d learned a lesson after the earlier TWO crashed in just a year’s time.

See, crashing is no big deal. You just go buy a new hard drive and start over, right? Not! There’s the small matter of some 10,000 files I had that may or may not (still) be tediously recovered from the old drive and re-saved onto the new one.

For me, those files include perhaps a thousand Word documents, 5,000 e-mail messages stored in browser folders, several hundred images that go to various web sites, including mine, and nifty little downloaded programs that I might never find again like the fun "gun.exe." By the time I finished paying for data recovery, a new hard drive and many days of a technician’s time, the cost was about $3,300.

What could I have done better? What I knew I should be doing and exactly what I do now. I now make a recovery disk for my computer every few days and then save it for the inevitable next crash. But one of those only lets you restart your computer after something semi-deep and deadly happens. It won’t save your data from things like corruption.

What I do now that’s even better is to run an internal tape back-up device (about $270). I just click a button and everything I do is saved. From 50-200 Gigabytes which means that I can save ... well, actually everything on my hard drive, anytime that I want. So about a year from now, when this hard drive crashes, I can perhaps save several thousand dollars and be up and running again in a few hours instead of being without my documents for weeks.

I didn’t lose any clients. Fortunately, one had HIS hard drive crash a few days before mine. And he works for a big online firm, which made me feel a little less dumb. Other clients e-mailed back to me many of the current files we were working on. But what if my clients had instead been the snarly, "make-wrong" kind? How understanding would your clients be if you could not find their important files for weeks?

Bottom line? You cannot beat the odds. Your hard drive will crash! Save money, time, and clients by backing up not just your documents, but everything on your hard drive, with a tape drive. Read arguments about making tape backups at Hewlett-Packard . Or at, EquipTek Labs. A tape backup drive will, sooner than later, be the best computer money you ever spent (or saved!)

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Published: July 21, 1999

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .