After about 5 months of school this year my son's hard drive crashed.  He uses Switched on Schoolhouse by Alpha Omega.  This program saved him from being held back a year and enrolled in a Christian school.  (After a horrible 3rd grade year using mixed curriculum we tried to enroll him in a local Christian school thinking that homeschooling just wasn't for him.  The school had him take a placement test and the result was that he would have to repeat 3rd grade.  We decided to try a last ditch effort and bought the SOS program hoping we could get him caught up in 4th grade and enroll him the fall of his 5th grade year.  We have been using SOS ever since, and have had very good results.)

My husband is a programmer and works with computers all day, so I didn't panic when my son said he was having trouble with his computer.  Little did I know the extent of the damage.  He uses a Dell laptop and keeps all of his schoolwork stored on the hard drive. Everytime we closed the school program it asked us if we wanted to back-up his work.  Last year we had some issues at the beginning of the year, so I backed up all the work he had done to a file... on the hard drive. 

Then one day my son told me he couldn't turn on his computer.  I told him his dad would look at it when he got home.  The bad news came that night.  There was something wrong with the hard drive.  The good news: we got a new one from Dell for free because the laptop is still under warranty.  The bad news: we had to erase the original hard drive to prove that it was truly broken.  All of his work for the past 5 months was lost. 

By the time we got everything fixed he had lost another month of school.  So, now were playing catch up.  It's very frustrating. 

My advice:  always back up your work to an external source as well as the hard drive.  That way, if one goes, the other one is available.  It's so much less frustrating than having to repeat over half a year of schoolwork.