Millions of Americans depend on their computer to help them organize their life, stay on schedule, conduct business, pay their bills and a myriad of other activities. They have everything from their family photo albums to their entire business stored on their computer's hard drive. However, very few are prepared to deal with massive data loss.

Disaster recovery software is a tool that can help you recover lost or damaged information. It works by creating an exact copy of your hard drive. If you experience an operating system failure, simply pop in the disk and voila! -- everything is restored to its original state.

Disaster recovery software protects your entire system including your documents, photos, videos, music and more. It's exceptionally easy to use and typically takes less than 30 minutes to install. Back-ups can be programmed to run on specific dates and times. After creating your initial full system back-up, you can customize what data you want backed-up on a daily basis.

There's no need to run a full system back-up every day. Customizing the disaster recovery software is easy and only takes a few minutes to set up. Once you set it, you can forget it as it will continue to perform back-ups automatically.

Imagine for a moment how you would feel if you were to lose all of your emails and email addresses. What about the spreadsheet you worked on for a solid week? Or the presentation you will be giving to potential investors next week? Disaster recovery software can give it all back to you with the click of your mouse.

There are many things that can cause a data disaster. Acts of Nature such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes can wipe out your computer's hard drive. Sometimes hard drives die and need to be replaced. Occasionally, software becomes corrupted and unusable. Then there's the ever-present threat of malicious attacks such as viruses, worms and Trojan horses.

In today's world, data disaster recovery software is critical for any business, industry, financial institution, legal, medical or government entity. However, it's just as important to protect your home computer from potential data disaster.

Regardless of your data disaster recovery needs, there is plenty of software on the market to protect your computer should is suffer from serious malfunction. Personal use disaster recovery software range in price from $49 to $149. Commercial use disaster recovery software can range in price from $249 to more than $10,000.