This month’s Ouch! newsletter (warning: PDF) from SANS explains the importance of backups. Well worth reading, especially if you aren’t currently at least backing up your data. If you’re not sure whether you’re making backups, then I strongly recommend that you read this.

For my computers, I use a combination of techniques for backup. But the key component in my backup system is a set of tasks that run nightly, using Cobian Backup (Windows freeware) to back up data to an external hard drive.