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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, the old saying goes. While that bit of advice dates back several generations, it is as true in the digital era as it ever was. Protecting your computer from viruses and backing up your files is a relatively quick and easy thing to do to safeguard your personal information, photos, and data files.

Earlier this year, a study estimated that approximately sixteen percent of all the personal computers in the world were infected by a computer virus. That’s one in six. While some of these viruses are mere annoyances, creating pop-up advertisements on your monitor screen from time to time, others are much more dangerous.

Some of the viruses out there today can intercept your account numbers and passwords as you log on to legitimate websites for financial transactions. Credit card numbers, PIN numbers, and more can be compromised and can end up in the hands of hackers all over the globe. Each year millions of credit card numbers are stolen both from private computers and from commercial operations with lax security. While the credit card holder is generally not liable for charges made against their card fraudulently, you must first notice the problem. Some hackers try to use the cards for regular very small charges so as not to arouse the suspicion of the card holder.

Other computer viruses can actually turn your computer into a virtual zombie. These “bot” programs can give complete control over your computer to a hacker in a remote location through your internet connection. Hackers can then use your computer as a part of a huge network of hacked machines to attack large corporate or even government websites. They may even use the co-opted computers as virtual servers for illegal material.

Other virus writers are just plain vandals, taking delight in destroying data and corrupting operating systems of unsuspecting computer users. They can wipe out your important records, family photos, and anything else stored on your hard drive.

Fortunately, there are a number of very good virus protection programs that are constantly being updated to protect against the latest threats. Some of them even have routines that allow you to automatically back-up your files on one of their online servers each day. The most important things you can do to protect yourself are to install and regularly update virus protection software, and make regular back-up copies of all your important computer files.

Back-up copies not only protect your data against file-corrupting viruses, but also protect you against data loss from a hard drive failure. Without back-up copies, a hard drive failure means you either accept the loss of everything that was stored on the drive, or you find a hard drive data recovery house that can extract the files from the damaged hard drive. Data recovery companies can still recover the data on your computer in most cases when you experience either a hard drive failure, or data corruption due to a virus.