Just think if you lost everything on your home computer - pictures, important documents, everything.

If you're like most people, you don't have a backup plan.

When Al Epstein powered up his PC, a mini-personal tragedy ensued.

"It was making clicking noises and the screen had disappeared. So I went up and looked at it and I saw an error message saying that my hard drive could not be read and I knew that was bad news," Epstein said.

Epstein fortunately has a son-in-law with a computer business, so this last visit to see the grandkids also turned into an official IT trip.

"Unfortunately in this case sometimes it is possible to recover data off the drive depending on the problem. In this case it was a mechanical failure of the drive, so we basically had to replace the drive with a new hard drive," Jeff Biskowitz of Biskotech said.

For Jeff Biskowitz, such nightmare stories consume a large part of his business: Biskotech. He's begun urging clients like this local relax the back to back up and then relax.

"I just feel like I’ve taken the steps necessary to be preemptive and I’m in a good state of mind. Now, I don't have to worry about what if," Joe Ellner of Relax the Back said.

It's what TODAY’S TMJ4’s Scott Steele always tells friends and family too: back up, but it reminds him of that old phrase every parent uses: do as I say-not as I do. In this case he never had any systematic way of securing and sharing my data, so after two of his own drives crashed, sought some direction.

"Well I recommend implementing a backup storage solution, preferably something like this," Jeff Biskowitz said.

He came up with a network storage solution. The Nas 200 from Linksys has two empty bays for just about any hard drive you choose. Scott Steele found a couple of 500 gigabyte Seagates on sale.

Any intimidation was immediately alleviated. Set up was simple: pop off the back of the Nas 200, slide in the hard drives, plug the unit into your router, install some software on your PC and follow the step by step wizard.

"And now every file can be available to any computer over your network and even the internet if you want with security," Jeff Biskowitz said.

While you can easily program automatic backups, a manual button on the front is a user friendly alternative. It may take you a long time to fill up all the space on the additional drives but once you do, extra ports on the back let you plug in even more storage, making it easy to back up and share your files.

Scott Steele found the backup device for as little as $120 and Scott says setting up the whole project takes less than an hour.