And backing up your Hard drive means saving everything that is important to you. I don't back up program files and stuff like that, because I have all my install CDs (see my previous post on CD cases, to keep all that stuff in one place).

What I do back up is my digital pictures, my music files, any documents I create, all my personal stuff. If you like to save old emails, back those up too.

What it means is you transfer that information to another storage media - like CD-Rs. Then if your hard drive goes south, you don't lose all your important info.

To baclk stuff up, it really helps to have a CD burner. You can use Zip disks too, or even floppies, but floppies only hold a very little bit of stuff and is falling out of favor as a back up tool.