External hard drives are wonderful. You just plug them in and start filling them up like it is nobody's business. As long as you don't run out of space, what could possibly go wrong?

I'm here to tell you, external hard drives are not eternal. Unfortunately, I know firsthand. My personal external hard drive stopped working this past week. It contains every digital picture my wife has taken since our first child was born. That's 8 years worth of pictures! The very same pictures I've been meaning to backup for over a year now. It's funny(not ha ha funny) how we know things can happen, but until they do, we tell ourselves they won't. I mean, how could they ... right?

Now I'm stuck with shipping it off to a hard drive recovery specialist who will undoubtedly charge me an arm and a leg to get the data off(so much for my trip to Disney World). And I have no one to blame but myself. To add insult to injury, I already had another external hard drive ready to go, but surprisingly it doesn't work well when you don't take it out of the box.

The following advice applies to your personal and business files.

• Make at least one backup of your important files on a separate storage device.
• If possible, store the devices in different physical locations.

You will drastically increase the likelihood of keeping your sanity if one device should fail.

Trust me, this is a tough lesson to learn, and I'm writing about it so that others don't have to learn it the hard way, like I did. While the words are very close to being the same, "external" hard drives are not "eternal".

If you think it can't happen to you, think again.