Backups are the most important part of a disaster-recovery strategy. Often, people may not consider the importance of backups until they have lost everything. An urgent point to remember is that all hard drives fail eventually. It's a question of when, not if. I have seen some hard drives last 10 years and others last less than a year (even the brand new ones). Under no circumstances should you trust that your hard drive will work when you wake up the next morning. Though there is a good chance the hard drive in your computer will last an average of three years, this is not guaranteed. If you have important files on your machine, it is imperative that you back them up.

Thankfully, Linux Mint, our Swiss Army knife, has you covered with a basic backup utility to get you started. Simply called the Backup Tool, you can use it to back up and restore not only your data, but your installed applications as well. The following screenshot shows Mint&apos...