Backup your stuff

If you don't have a regular backup solution in place, stand up now and go get one. I can't stress enough the importance of this. Backup is literally a life and death issue- I would probably kill myself if I lost everything on my computer.

Today, for example, I lost all of my contacts. They just vanished, and so far I haven't been able to figure out why. (I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.1 and Address Book.) Fortunately, since I have a backup of my entire hard drive, I was able to just sub-in my Address Book info from my most recent backup (yesterday), so I didn't lose anything. Having that backup literally allowed me to copy some files and get on with my life- no sweat (besides the lingering uncertainty of what caused the problem). If I hadn't had that backup, the loss of my 775 contacts would have been devastating.

There are many different backup strategies, many different backup programs, and many different backup mediums. It's confusing. The easiest way to do it, in my opinion, is to buy a FireWire or USB 2 external hard drive that's at least as big as your computer's internal drive, and "clone" your drive to the external drive on a regular basis. This gives you a mirror image of your drive, which protects you from everything from losing a few files (like I did) all the way up to a complete hard drive crash.

Most drives come with software that makes it relatively fast and easy to do this.

There are many companies that make external drives. I happen to use LaCie drives, which work well for me.