This is Dr. Mercola, with a very interesting story to share with you today. It's about a friend of mine who is in the internet business. He recently told me how a programmer he hired about ten years ago was trying to do a good job for him and was running out of space on the hard drive at the time. Since he had some customer files that were no longer active, he thought that in order to save space, he could delete all those records.

Well, it was a while before my friend found out about it. It turned out that the records never should have been deleted. Ten years later, my friend estimates that by deleting those files, he lost over $20 million, which is a pretty significant hit. Fortunately, my friend recovered from the loss, and is doing quite well. But he learned his lesson; he learned to always back up his files. This incident is not quite as bad as the one that happened with a technician in Alaska who recently deleted files which were estimated to cost over $38 billion.

If you're going to have files deleted or lost, there's a good chance that you can become depressed, and the depression could be so severe as to potentially cause suicidal feelings. So this video will help you learn how to prevent potential suicidal depression that could result should your primary hard drive fail.

Here are a few key principles. The first is to back up your files, not on your primary drive, but on an external drive. Now, you could back it up online, but that's a little bit more expensive and a little less convenient. So, get yourself an external hard drive. In fact, get two external drives because if you really want to back up a file, I suggest having two copies, because it's just better insurance.

Actually I go overboard; I make sure to have three copies of my files, because I just never want to run into that situation. I've done it once before, and it was really devastating. In fact, I did become depressed when that happened, and I want to help you prevent that.

There are a few other key points to know. Most of the time, people tend to back up their "My Documents" file because it's a little bit easier. Most of your data is in that folder if you're running Windows. But what's really crucial is that if you're using Outlook as your e-mail client, then those files typically are not in the "My Document" directory unless you go into settings and specifically change the directory where those are stored. So, you'll want to make sure you also back up your e-mail folders because that's going to be really important, unless of course, you're using some type of off-line email client, like G-Mail or Yahoo.

The key then is to get multiple hard drives, and to help you in that process, I put a link on this page to a pretty good drive from Amazon that has 500 gigabytes, and it's only $150. I've seen them on the internet for as low as $100, but that was a one-time sale. So, for anywhere from $200 to $300, you can get a terabyte, (a full 1,000 gigabytes) of data storage that will easily allow you to back up most all of your files on a regular basis.

I urge you to definitely make that commitment. But even if you have your hard drives and are committed to it, you need a practical strategy. So you'll want to remind yourself to do this, because if you just leave it on the back burner in your brain, "Oh, yes. I need to back up," it could be six months to a year before you may get around to doing it. I personally use Outlook for reminders.

But there are automated backup solutions, and there's another link on this video to one of my favorite editors from CNET, Tom Merritt; I really enjoy that site. Tom has a four-minute explanation of how to use the free software that's included with Windows to do those types of backups. You'll just need to sit through a short advertisement at the beginning of the presentation, but it's brief, and Tom's information will quickly follow it.

So, be committed to having an external drive. As I mentioned, if you have two drives, you can keep one drive at home or at the office, and the other off site in a remote location. So, in case of some type of natural disaster (hurricane, flood or fire) your primary hard drive and your backup won't be destroyed. You'll have a rescue drive that you can recover most of your data from.

So, now you have some excellent strategies to help you avoid getting depressed from losing data unnecessarily. After all, if you're depressed, you're not going to be able to lead a healthy lifestyle. It would be difficult to make wise choices, to eat the right foods and to exercise. So I hope this will encourage you, and that you'll be inspired to go out and get your drives and begin using them, and with that concern out of the way, continue to take control of your health.