It's a fact of life that programs crash, hard-drives die and websites close. That's why it's essential to have back-ups of all your essential programs and information.

Here are some programs / websites that allow you to do backups. You can either keep the back-ups on your hard-drive or even better, buy a USB flash drive or a re-writable CD disk to keep all backups off-site. You can also buy a back-up hard-drive that is permanently attached to your regular PC hard-drive which is constantly backed up by a synchronisation tool such as SyncBack. But if you decide to keep your back-ups on your main hard-drive, make sure you have a way of getting to them if your hard-drive dies. Make a separate "backup" folder and update it regularly.

1. Back-up Mozilla Firefox - after being let down by the FEBE Firefox back-up tool, I started hunting around for another Firefox profile back-up program. I finally found MozBackup and it seems to be much better than FEBE. Backing up your profile seems to be easy but the program author warns that some Firefox extensions are not supported in the back-up. So I keep a "txt" file with a list of all my extensions. If one fails to be restored, I can then Google it and re-install it myself.

2. Back-up Outlook Express - I don't use OE but my girlfriend does. We keep a backup of her emails and address book using ABF Outlook Express Backup. It encloses everything in a password-protected "exe" file which can then be double-clicked on and restored to OE if disaster strikes.

3. Back up your Skype contacts - Go to Tools then Advanced then "Back up contacts to file". This creates a "vcf" file of all your contacts.

4. Back up your del.icio.us weblinks - go to Settings then "Export / Backup". Decide if you want your tags and notes saved too. Then generate the backup. This is saved as a HTML webpage.

5. Backup your photographs - export them all to a free Flickr account using the Flickr Uploadr.