My biggest fear for my clients is any loss of information on their computers, especially photos. These days people are using their smartphones more and more as their main camera with little or no backup of these important files. Ideally these should be backed up on a very regular basis in case of loss of device, accidental deletion or, if saved to your PC, hard drive failure. There are many ways to do this - save to DVD, USB stick and external hard drive. These are all great, but they are are also susceptible to failure and they require you to consciously make the effort to back them up. I highly recommend a paid-for online service to back up all your data (photos, files, etc.) using something like Carbonite.com but if you just want to make sure your photos are saved you can use free services such as Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, or Google Photos.

Microsoft OneDrive: this is a great solution since it's one of the few services that will work across all computer and smartphone platforms (iOS, Windows Phone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac OSX). You receive 15GB for free and another 15GB if you use your smartphone to backup your photos for a total of 30GB. If you purchase Office 365 you get unlimited storage for all your files.

iCloud: this is the most limited since it doesn't work on all platforms and you only get 5GB free.

Google Photos: recently Google announced that it was offering free unlimited storage for all your photos up to 16MB in size, which is much less than what most people are taking pictures with on their smartphones or even point-and-shoot cameras. Google Photos will work with Android and iOS smartphones by downloading the app from the respective app stores and with PC's by using the desktop app.

With all these services you are not only backing up all your photos you are also able to access all your photos from your devices - desktop and/or PC.

Regardless of what, if any, backup service you currently use I would recommend that you also use Google Photos to back up your photos. It doesn't cost you anything and it even if you use another online service it never hurts to have another backup of all your precious memories. Personally, I am now using Carbonite, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Photos.