[Jason Dunn]

Data loss is brutal to deal with. Regular Digital Home Thoughts readers know that I bring up the issue of data backup regularly, because sadly most people don't take data backups seriously until they've lost something they cared about (I know I was the same way). The folks at Seagate, in conjunction with Notebooks.com and nine other Web sites, would like to give one lucky winner a head start on changing their backup habits by giving them a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB portable drive, and a monstrous 1TB FreeAgent Desk drive. For those of you not so good at the mathematics, that's 1500 GB of storage space, all at blazing USB 2.0 speeds. What's not to love?

Want to win this hard drive prize package? All you have to do is answer the following question: What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened? Post your reply in this discussion thread, one comment per person. The winner will be chosen randomly from all the posted comments. Your deadline for submitting your comment is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on December the 6th. The winner will be announced on Monday the 8th.

Interested in increasing your chances of winning? Stop by each of these other nine great sites and enter their contests as well:

• CrunchGear
• Bleeping Computer
• Gotta Be Mobile
• Notebooks.com
• GeeksToGo
• PlanetAMD64.com
• Gadgetell
• Paulstamatiou.com
• Macenstein.com
• Bleeping Computer

UPDATE: ...and the winner of this contest is...Heatwave316! Thanks to everyone for entering - it was great to see 160 entries for this contest, although it was hard to read about some data loss stories - I feel your pain, I know what it's like. For the 159 of you who didn't win, and to everyone else reading this, I'd really encourage you to back up your data if you're not already doing so. An external USB hard drive is a great way to start, but automatic online backups are an even more economical way to back up your data and they have the added protection of being off site - that local hard drive sitting next to your computer? Fire, flood, theft, or any number of other things will take that hard drive out if it takes your computer out. My personal choice for online backups is Mozy [Affiliate], and they just so happen to have a 10% discount coupon this month. The coupon code is DECEMBER. I'm currently backing up just over 180 GB of data with Mozy (yeah, it took a while to upload) and all my restore tests have worked quite well. Give it a try!

[Jason Dunn]

Data loss is brutal to deal with. Regular Digital Home Thoughts readers know that I bring up the issue of data backup regularly, because sadly most people don't take data backups seriously until they've lost something they cared about (I know I was the same way). The folks at Seagate, in conjunction with Notebooks.com and nine other Web sites, would like to give one lucky winner a head start on changing their backup habits by giving them a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB portable drive, and a monstrous 1TB FreeAgent Desk drive. For those of you not so good at the mathematics, that's 1500 GB of storage space, all at blazing USB 2.0 speeds. What's not to love?

Want to win this hard drive prize package? All you have to do is answer the following question: What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened? Post your reply in this discussion thread, one comment per person. The winner will be chosen randomly from all the posted comments. Your deadline for submitting your comment is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on December the 6th. The winner will be announced on Monday the 8th.

Interested in increasing your chances of winning? Stop by each of these other nine great sites and enter their contests as well:

• CrunchGear
• Bleeping Computer
• Gotta Be Mobile
• Notebooks.com
• GeeksToGo
• PlanetAMD64.com
• Gadgetell
• Paulstamatiou.com
• Macenstein.com
• Bleeping Computer

UPDATE: ...and the winner of this contest is...Heatwave316! Thanks to everyone for entering - it was great to see 160 entries for this contest, although it was hard to read about some data loss stories - I feel your pain, I know what it's like. For the 159 of you who didn't win, and to everyone else reading this, I'd really encourage you to back up your data if you're not already doing so. An external USB hard drive is a great way to start, but automatic online backups are an even more economical way to back up your data and they have the added protection of being off site - that local hard drive sitting next to your computer? Fire, flood, theft, or any number of other things will take that hard drive out if it takes your computer out. My personal choice for online backups is Mozy [Affiliate], and they just so happen to have a 10% discount coupon this month. The coupon code is DECEMBER. I'm currently backing up just over 180 GB of data with Mozy (yeah, it took a while to upload) and all my restore tests have worked quite well. Give it a try!

[egads]

I'd backup my work data. Never hurts to have an extra copy of your work laying around!

[Stinger]

Yay, another awesome Thoughts competition!

The main two things I back up are my media and photos. It would be a pain but I could re-rip my CD/DVDs. However, if I lost my photos I would be devastated. So many memories.

[Dyvim]

Work data, documents, photos, music, video- pretty much everything on my notebook.

I lost over 100 GB of music last year when my external HD crashed (and I still haven't finished the task of re-ripping all that music from CD), and now I keep my digital media on 2 NAS drives. But I can always use more storage as those NAS drives are filling up.

[jaxim]

I just bought a HD camcorder (Canon HF100). I bought it because I just became a new daddy and wanted to capture every waking moment of my daughter (in glorious high definition of course ;-)

I'm currently storing the video files on my hard drive but I have no way of backing up the files because my backup media is too small, so I need a drive like this Seagate drive to store all these memories. I'd be devestated if any of these video files were lost, especially the first video of my daughter, the video of her birth.

[alese]

I have quite a lot of work stuff on my Notebook and I really wouldn't like to loose that, but the two most important things are my pictures at home and my PIM data at work on Exchange.

I would be devastated if I'd loose pictures, so I keep them on my two 500GB drives connected into RAID1 and additionally on another external drive, as for PIM data with all my contacts and phone numbers - I would be lost without it, but Exchange is well backed up and also have backup of PIM data on my phone...

As for loosing data - I was rather fortunate until now - I lost some things here and there over the years but nothing I couldn't replace or rebuild...

[Sfrick]

I had a great back up plan until the drive died. I sure would like to bring a new friend home.

[jrmfzf]

My biggest concern would be photos. I have thousands of them from over the years and both me and my wife would be devastated if we lost them. On top of that, my wife is pregnant and expecting in June, so I know at that time the camera is going to be snapping constantly and I'll probably start using my camcorder a lot more. Too many memories to leave it to chance.

[gstenger]

As a web developer, I run the development version of my web application on my laptop. Although changes are pushed out fairly regularly to the staging environment, it would be really bad to lose even a day's worth of work. It would great to never have to worry about running out of free space on my backup drive!

[BMWlover318]

What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?

I would be devastated if I lost all my music. It would take months to reload my CDs back onto a hard drive.

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I have not lost important data permanently, but I have had old backup hard drives crash.