If you are self-employed and work from home, you wear several hats, so to speak: you may be the marketing manager, accountant, receptionist or PR person. You are also your own technical support department and therefore responsible for safeguarding your data. You should be clear about two things: 1. Sooner or later, disaster will strike. It does not have to be anything as dramatic as storm, fire or flood - an overheated motherboard, a malfunctioning hard drive or a computer virus can be enough. 2. The cost of backup hardware and media is trivial compared to the value of your data. Imagine that you lost your customer list, your product database or other crucial business data. How would your business continue? Here are some tips for implementing a disaster recovery strategy: Buy an external hard drive. These hard drives, which connect to your computer via the USB 2.0 or FireWire port (check which port your computer has) have fallen dramatically in price. Some of them are about