A few years ago I decided that I needed to be more responsible and back up my PC. I bought a cheap WD Elements external hard drive and started doing weekly backups of the folders where my data was. Well, my PC died recently so I got to test my backup yesterday. There is always that nagging doubt that you don't know if your backup plan is working until you have to try and restore from it, but I'm happy to say that although my strategy was quite basic, I have managed to get everything back and restored to my new notebook.
Well, I say "everything" but I wasn't backing up my Outlook .pst file so I have lost quite a few emails. Hopefully I can get someone to recover that from the old hard drive for me.