Backing up your hard drive is a lot like flossing. You know you should do it, but often many people don’t bother. Including me.

I mean, backing up. Yes, I floss, but I’m not very good at backing up regularly. I was reminded about the value of the backup when my iBook’s hard drive decided to sputter out. Fortunately I got some advance warning--the drive was making its death rattle--so I knew something was amiss and backed up all my important documents. I actually have more free space on my hard drive than I had before, mainly because I didn’t install and restore everything I had on it before, mainly because I don’t need it. A 30 GB hard drive requires exercising a lot of restraint.

I was going to write an article on Boot Camp, but I’m sure you’ve read enough about that already. In fact, you’ve probably overdosed on it and the sheer mention of Boot Camp in this article is probably making you go into convulsions. Anyway, I digress.

Are you spotty with your backups? Start doing it. Now. A good place to start is to buy an external hard drive. An 80 GB hard drive can be had for relatively cheap (under $100). Go! Make haste to your local electronics store and purchase one! I’ll wait.

OK, you got one? good. If you can’t afford one right now, you could always use a second Mac that you don’t use often in the interim, but do be certain that the hard drive is in good shape. That’s what I’m doing until I can afford an external drive. Being a poor college student sucks.

There are other forms of media too, from re-writable CDs or DVDs, flash drives, or tape drives. but generally speaking an external hard drive is going to be your best choice, considering price, speed, convenience, and so on.

From there, you’ll need a way to get the files onto the external hard drive.

The cheap and tedious way
Drag your stuff to the hard drive.

The cheap and easy way
Use a free hard drive utility like Carbon Copy Cloner Windows users: I’m sure a Windows equivalent exists. If you know of some, please post a comment. Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to schedule backups and allows you to pick and choose what you want to back up to an extent (though it isn’t as flexible as other tools out there).

The more expensive way
Use a dedicated backup utility. Retrospect (Windows version) is probably the ultimate backup utility out there. Or at least among the ultimate backup utilities.  It isn’t the cheapest, however; a full copy usually runs around $130. But if you’re serious about backing up, it’s a great utility.

If you’re on a tighter budget and are running Windows, Norton ghost is an option as well. .mac users can use Apple’s Backup utility. [UPDATE: Don’t use Backup; it’s very temperamental.] There are many other methods and utilities out there, so do some homework. this article is meant to get you started and is not exactly the most exhaustive article on the topic.

The key is keeping up to date. Otherwise, if/when your hard drive does fail, you’ll be cussing left and right when you realize that your last backup is from the Reagan Administration. Once a week is good; you can set your backup utility to run in the middle of the night. If you’re using your computer in a business environment or are working with tons of extremely important data everyday, a nightly backup is a must. Either way, you’ll want to have several backups of your most important documents, on several different devices. While you may be able to do without that letter you wrote to your brother last month, I’m guessing you’d like to still have a working backup of your photos and Quicken documents even if your main backup device decides to crap out. Just as you can never have too much RAM, you can never have too many backups. Of course that doesn’t mean you need to have boxes full of 100 flash drives containing backups, but you get the idea.

If you’re already backing up regularly, great. If not, what are you waiting for! Back up before it’s too late!