I'm posting this personal experience to warn about the risk of keeping your important documents solely as electronic files. Even having a backup, like an external drive, is not fail-safe.
In my case, my important files included a lot of DS material, especially copies of discussions on this forum, and also various typed notes, photos, and other documents related to DS. All of these were saved on my computer hard drive and also on a Seagate external drive. My DS files were not the only documents involved, but a small part of all the things I had worked on over the past several years, including five years of genealogy research and writing projects.
A few days after Christmas, the hard drive on my 5-year-old Dell laptop gave out without warning. Having to buy a new computer was not something I would have wished to do, but that seemed almost a small price to pay in comparison with the thought of losing five years worth of files. (I brought in my hard drive to a tech squad and was told it wasn't readable and even caused their equipment to freeze up.) Fortunately, I had backed everything up on the Seagate device (considered one of the best manufacturers in the business), except for the past month. My greatest concern in the next few weeks, in addition to buying a new computer, was to reconstruct the work I had done and now permanently lost in the past month.
I thought I could breathe easily about all my old files, and didn't even take time to try accessing them for a few weeks. When I finally did, I found that my Seagate drive was not recognized by my new computer. I spent several days in near panic phoning tech people at computer stores and searching online forums for people having similar problems. The tech squad at one large retailer had no clue as to why this should be. At another store, a sales person told me that the problem was the difference between XP - which was the operating system on my old computer - and Windows 7, the new operating system, and the only one available on any new computer now sold (except for Apples). He suggested I might try to install Windows XP on my new computer as well, which he said allowed a dual-boot, and that I would then be able to access my storage device. I searched online and found instructions on how to install XP as a dual boot, but found that I would need the original disk from my old computer having the XP operating system on it. Then I remembered that I had thrown out the disks and things from my old computer, having seen no reason to save anything from a system now considered obsolete.
I tried many suggested fixes I read about on forums, but none worked.
Luckily, I remembered that my local library has some old computers and was able to obtain permission to bring in my external drive. Unbelievably, my storage device was not recognized on the old computers running Windows XP either.
In the meantime I had been e-mailed with Seagate's support for several days, answering dozens of questions and asking many of my own, which always seemed to be only partially answered.
Eventually Seagate gave me a code to download software from their website which would allow my device to be recognized on the XP computer. I was then to make some configuration changes to the device and would be able to access my files on my Windows 7 computer although without full functionality. Now it sounded like the problem was not only an XP - Windows 7 incompatibility, but the fact that my new laptop is 64-bit, where the storage devices are made only for 32-bit computers (whatever that means).
To draw this long story to a close, I was eventually able to access my storage on my new computer and transfer all my old files to the new computer.
My question remains now: how should I backup up all my important files this time? The external drives seem a good bet, but obviously technology can fail or not work, as I had experienced. Jump drives are pretty risky; I've had more than one turn out to be defective, and if they're not used regularly, they can lose their electrical charge and everything stored on them (funny they don't tell you that on the package). There's also a risk of making a mistake with these devices (such as re-partioning them), which instantaneously deletes everything stored on the device. Last year I had looked into a company that backs up your system, but I read of countless problems and complaints from people who paid for this service, including problems with their computers slowing down and freezing from the software that is installed remotely. There is Google docs, which apparently has some glitches, and it appears you have to save one document at a time - not very practical when you have hundreds of documents. Plus they wouldn't be organized in the folders the way you have them on your computer. It's also impractical (for me, at least) to print everything out - that would be thousands of pages, and many of these documents are continually being added to or revised.
So at the moment I have a new Seagate device that I had bought last fall but never used. (The old one cannot be used to store documents on a 64-bit computer.) Low and behold, wouldn't you know, but when I plugged it in, a message popped up saying that this $70 device purchased late last fall is only for a 32-bit computer. Now Seagate has sent me a code to download software for this device, which will allow me to use it (hopefully) with limited functionality.
I don't know of a foolproof answer, and there may not be one.
I just hope no one else has to go through what I have gone through these past few weeks.
Backup your DS files and everything else that's important - but remember that technology has its limits, and there is usually no warning when failure happens.