46% of Users Never Back Up Their PC

Not surprising, but shocking nonetheless: Hard-drive company Maxtor polled 2,600 computer users and found that nearly half of them never make backups. Not once a month, not once a year: Never.

That's pretty much the long and short of this announcement, which Maxtor is using to try to get you to buy more of its hard drives for backup purposes. Also according the the piece, of those users who do back up data, they "overwhelming[ly] prefer to store the information on CDs or DVDs, while nearly one quarter use thumb drives or USB keys."

Maxtor says that hard drives make for a better backup solution, and in part it is right: Hard drives are faster and much larger, so you can store much more data on them than on those other media types. (Maxtor would also have you believe that password protection is a big concern. Sorry Maxtor,hard drives aren't any more secure than the other media types, and they can't be password protected without additional software. Most thumb drives include some kind of encryption software now by default, too.)

My backup strategy is this: I copy files between two PCs so I always have a live copy, and I make periodic backups to an external hard drive as well. Once a year I backup to DVD, which I keep in a fire safe.

What's your backup strategy? And bear in mind, I know that 46 percent of you will say, "Nothing."