What is more important than having the latest and greatest digital SLR body? What is even more important than getting the best lens your can afford? What is more important than using the best digital workflow management software and the best image editing software? Yes, its your friend the backup tool.Yes, people always get excited and totally thrilled when they hear the “B-Word”. Usually they just yawn and move on with their lives. “C’mon, how bad can it be? I burn a CD/DVD with my photos once a months, I have the extra copy on my HD. I have nothing to worry about. And what are the odds that my HD will ever fail?” – Wrong! All wrong … I can’t emphasize this often enough to my friends and family (and everybody else who doesn’t run away fast enough ;o) ). The question is not if your HD will fail, the question is just when? “If” btw. is covered by your HD’s technical specification and its called “MTBF” – mean time between failures (noticed the failure-word in there?).So let’s not fool ourselves: a proper backup strategy has to be on top of your priority list. Figuring out what the right thing to do is, isn’t really obvious (and certainly depends on your personal level of paranoia), but its not all that complicated either. And once you have an appropriate backup strategy set up and implemented it should just work transparently in the background and you should have perfect (and well deserved) peace of mind: all your photos will be save and sound for eternity (or at least for as long as you really care ;o) ) and you can go back to focusing on more fun things like checking out the latest dSLR bodies, geeking out on lens reviews and of course the most important of all: go out and take some great photos!Over the next couple of weeks we will post a couple of articles outlining our current plan for our backup strategy, the products that will be used to implement it and how it will all be setup.