If your computer crashes during an image-editing session, you lose all the changes that you made since the last time you saved the image. In most cases, the original image file remains intact, and you can just open the image and start over after you re-boot your computer. But for various reasons, hard drives can and do fail completely, in which case your image files may be unrecoverable.

To protect yourself from this disastrous scenario, use a CD recorder to copy important image files to an archival CD. If you're really paranoid, make two copies of each disc and send one copy to a friend or relative for safekeeping.

Be sure to use a high-quality CD-R disc, which prevents anyone (including you) from erasing the files after they're copied to CD.

If you don't have a CD recorder, you can take your images to a commercial imaging lab for copying to CD. You can also archive image files to a magnetic media such as a Zip disk, but remember that data on this type of storage may degrade in as few as 10 years, while CD-R discs have a life span of about 100 years.