OK, be honest here — how many of you actually back up your computers’ hard drives on a regular basis? If you don’t, you’re playing with fire. Your hard drive will die one day, trust me. It’s a fact of computer life. When that happens, how much data will you lose — days, months, years?

It’s a shame, too, because modern operating systems, like Windows Vista and Mac OS X, make it easy to do regularly-scheduled backups. To do that, though, you’ll need an external drive to store your backups. In my case, I have a 1 Terabyte (TB) drive to which I back up my data every hour. That peace of mind is good to have.

When I bought my drive, it was more than $300. It’s good to see that prices for that much storage have dropped significantly. Take, for example, the MicroNet G-Force External 1TB Hard Drive. It’s about a third of what I spent, for the same amount of storage.

One TB of storage is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes — that’s a lot of space for your pictures, documents, videos and other assorted stuff. In my full-time job, I work with a lot of large files, so I have serious space needs. The drive I use for backup isn’t nearly full yet, meaning if you’re an average user, it will take a long time before that drive fills up.

This drive works with both PCs and Macs; any computer with a USB 2.0 connection. It’s a strong value for something as important as backing up your vital data. I wouldn’t skimp on an item like this any longer, if I were you. You’ll regret it if you do.