What's the best way to protect our hard drive data?

Simply take time to fine tune you defrag program. With this measure, you can be sure that your Swap and Mater files will never defrag. There are two important files that will never defrag once you make room for defrag: The Master File Table and the swap file. Keep in mind that the Master file table will expand each time you add more files. You have to therefore create more space. This can be done by editing into your registry and locating the key

redundancy. back it up on multiple external hard drives.

i say multiple because one time i went on a cross country trip and camped all around..i met great people, had amazing experiences, and i filmed, and took pics, of most of it. The first thing i did when i got home was went and bought a very nice 1TB external hard drive to store all my data. I put all the data on there and then put it away back in the box and into my closet. A few months later someone stole my computer will all my pics and videos so i got a new computer and i went to hook up the external hard drive to put all my data from it on to my new computer but when i plugged it in(the 2nd time i ever used this) it gave an error and was corrupted somehow and i lost ALL my photos and videos. So i had them saved on both my computer and an external hard drive but still lost it all. I would suggest cloud storage(if you trust that) and if not i would suggest 2 or 3 external hard drives made by different companies and back it all up.

By the help of Backing up Your Data, Use the Windows Recovery Console, Password Protection, Get Rid of Old Junk.

Defrag your hard drives. This will put files that link with one another closer on the drive itself, which means the pin that reads data on the drive doesn't have to move as much to get to different files.

I really like Defraggler, put there are a lot of good defrag programs out there :)

Keeping a manual log that is kept in a safe place. Because, it is more secure to be on hand, then one that is left up to an outside source about whether you have it or not.

I guess you could just use a USB to keep your files safe. But then you need to worry abour the usb