Your photos, music and data are just a virus or hard disk failure away from oblivion. Build a triple-layer defence using PC Authority's practical guide.

Our feature story covers best formats, backup options, and why you should reburn those photo CDs every two years.

Climb the steps all the way to Windows guru status with our invaluable selection of tips and shortcuts for XP and Vista.

Stuck for storage space? Upgrade to one of the latest disks and you’ll benefit from better performance too

Does dropping a hard disk from a third floor window or dunking it in a cup of tea mean curtains for your data? We visit Ontrack's data recovery labs to find out.

External hard disks are a great way to add storage. We test 13, from sub-$130 portable drives to mighty terabyte desktop units.

New wizards make it easier to use, and the range of operations is impressive for such a reasonable price

High-capacity desktop drives have never been so affordable. Darien Graham-Smith puts 23 to the test to find the best

Stuart Andrews shows you how to set up and maintain the perfect backup routine.

Disk-imaging software can be put to many varied uses, and products like Drive Image prove particularly useful in our labs when upgrading to a new hard disk or for swiftly refreshing a test system.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

Data recovery is a mystical and varied art that shares much with archaeology. Depending on where you dig for data you may or may not find what you are looking for, and the longer you leave going after your lost data the greater the chance it will be worn away by age and reduced to fragments of its former self.

Leigh Dyer looks at how to get failover redundancy on a shoestring budget

Every expert has a toolkit. Tim Dean takes you through the 10 tools any Windows expert cannot live without. So, to give you a head start, here are PC Authority's top 10 tools for the ultimate Windows user.

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Devices that attach storage to the network aren't new, but until now they've been either very expensive or limited in ability. But this little marvel from Asus changes all that. The WL-HDD can put a hard disk on the network with no drivers or client software required, and it can do this wirelessly via 802.11g.