It happens. You go to bed tonight and the computer is fine. In the morning you press the power button and get nothing. No lights, no fan, no logo. It's done.

Now, this may be a simple fix. Even if the computer is truly dead, often the drive is ok. I pull the drive out and copy it or transfer your data to a new computer.

But sometimes it's not that easy. Newer Macs don't have removable drives. Some Windows drives are encrypted. If you have access to the encryption key, no problem. If you don't...

So if it is dead, what just went with it? Every photo from every trip and birthday. The tax folder. The kids' school files. That project you keep meaning to finish. If the answer is "a lot," this is the post I've been building toward all week.

The good news is you can fix this in about 20 minutes, and you can do it this weekend. Here's the whole thing, start to finish.

Step 1: Decide what you'd actually miss

Don't try to save everything. Windows, your programs, the operating system, all of that reinstalls. Focus on the stuff you can't get back. Photos and videos. Documents. Anything you made yourself. On most computers that lives in three places: your Desktop, your Documents folder, and your Pictures folder. Start there and you've covered the things that matter.

Step 2: Pick one place. Just one.

An external drive or the cloud. That's the whole decision, and either one beats what most people have now, which is nothing.

If you want the safest setup you'll eventually want both, because a copy in your house and a copy off-site covers you no matter what. But one is infinitely better than zero, so don't stall on this. Pick whichever is easier for you today.

An external drive means buying one with more space than your computer holds and plugging it in. Cloud means a service like OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, or Backblaze. I compared the two in Wednesday's post if you want help choosing.

Step 3: Turn on the automatic option

A backup you have to remember to run is a backup that won't happen. Life gets busy and you forget, and the one week you forget is the week the drive dies.

So turn on the setting that does it for you. On Windows with an external drive, that's File History. On a Mac, it's Time Machine. With a cloud service, switch on automatic backup and let it handle your Desktop, Documents, and Pictures. Set it once and let it run in the background.

Step 4: Prove it actually ran

Come back the next day and check that there's a recent backup with a current date on it. Then open one file straight from the backup to make sure it's really there and really opens.

That's the whole thing

Twenty minutes. Pick what matters, pick one drive or cloud, turn on the automatic option, and confirm it ran. Do that and the nightmare at the top of this post turns into a shrug. Computer died? Fine. Everything's already somewhere else.

I'll be honest about why I harp on this. The most expensive repair I do is data recovery, and it's the one I hate handing people a bill for. See what data recovery actually costs. The 20-minute weekend version beats the four-figure lab version every single time.

If you'd rather have it done right the first time, book a session and we'll set the whole thing up together in one sitting.