If you don't back up your PC….you'll be sorry. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. From your financial data to digital photos and digital music…chances are you've got lots of stuff on your desktop or notebook computer…that you really wouldn't want to lose. But hard drives….where it is all stored….eventually fail…sometimes sooner rather than later. At IBM, Chris Stakutis is chief technology officer of Tivoli continuous data protection….

"It's almost amazing how we have become agnostic of our computer's health. Would you think of getting in your car and not putting your seatbelt on? And you wouldn't frankly buy a car that didn't have air bags. Yet we walk around with our computers with this risk hanging and looming over us."

Stakutis says many companies and individuals have learned the hard way just how necessary back-ups are. And while most of its customers are corporations, IBM is selling an affordable solution for consumers. Continuous Data Protection is different from programs that back up data onto discs ….because it does what its name implies….backs up files continuously….to a separate area of a hard drive….and to an external or network drive….

"CDs can't hold your 60 gigabyte hard drive, so most people have just stopped doing back-ups, have completely ignored the fact that they're at risk. Our software tries to make this transparent for you. All the time in the background when a file is saved or changed, it makes a copy for you and it versions it off to the side."

The price…35 dollars. You can find more information and a free trial at ibm.com/Tivoli. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.