I often hear this question posed to gauge how valuable things are in our lives: "What's the one thing you would grab before heading out the door if you had to leave the house and all other belongings behind?"

According to a recent study funded by Sony Electronics (conducted by The Parenting Group's Mom Connection network), 76% of moms would take family photos and videos ahead of purses, jewelry and other valuables. And 70% of those surveyed said they "were likely to invest time to learn about a new technology that would help safeguard against the loss of family photos and videos."

The survey said moms outnumber dads by 4-to-1 in serving as the role of the family photographer/videographer/archivist. If this person in your life has moved toward digital photography (or if you are this person), storing these photos properly, and protecting them from loss should be a high priority.

Because of our business mentality, we often think that data such as documents, spreadsheets and other "business" files are worth protecting more than "consumer" items like digital photos, music files and home videos. But as the Sony study suggests, family photos and videos have a high value in the minds of moms out there.

If you don't have such a plan, we can help – Network Life recently published a set of articles on different storage and back-up strategies for the files in our lives that really matter – photos, videos and music files we've purchased (at 99 cents per song, losing these can be devastating if you've downloaded a lot).

Here's a quick checklist of things you should do:

• Back up, back up, back up. Sounds simple, but it's worth the reminder. Use back-up software (free trial of Dantz Retrospect here - and off-load the data onto a CD or other external media. Go through the files on your PCs and think about what files you couldn't live without. This includes game data (I have been spending far too many hours creating an online game character, I'd hate to have that data wiped out).
• Think about centralizing your storage onto a network-attached storage drive (Maxtor, SimpleTech and Buffalo all make excellent equipment). Centralizing storage on the network improves efficiency in finding out where everything is, and reduces redundancy in terms of storage space. If you don't feel like adding this to the network, think about an external hard drive for extra storage.
• If you do back up onto a CD or other external media, bring these backups to a separate physical location. You may be backing up all your data onto a ZIP disk, but it's no good if the ZIP disk just sits on top of the same computer where all your photos are. One disaster (flood, fire, etc.) could wipe out all the hard work.