I, too, lost everything from my hard drive, once upon a time. It was probably ten or fifteen years ago--possibly even more. The only thing I would have really missed at that time was my budget records. I keep a very detailed budget. And fortunately, that was the one and only thing I had backed up on a disk (it was long enough ago to be one of those smaller "floppy" disks we used to use). Even after that I didn't get into a regular habit of backing up.
Now, though, I use the free version of Macrium Reflect and have it set up to do a full backup the first of every month, plus a daily differential backup at 9:00 pm. The backups go on an external "My Passport Ultra" 1 Tb hard drive. It's set up to keep the last 12 full backups, plus the three most recent differential backups.
I do have to admit I don't stick to that schedule. I don't leave the external drive plugged in, because that's not a "best practice"--plus the fact that it interferes with the operation of my mouse. So I only do backups when I remember to plug it in. Which is not every night.
Still, I'm usually pretty close to up to date, which is much better than I used to be. I only started backing up regularly sometime last year. Before that I backed up my data files occasionally, not nearly often enough.
