Jim says: "I don't know how people do it who wipe their drives every 6 months".

Backups, my friend, backups. I burn documents to disc every month or so -- everything in my "My Documents" folder and whatever I was working on that month. Really I should be doing it every week. Everything else on my hard drives is expendible (nice thought, eh?). No, it's because it's backed up already and it just on my hard drive for convenience, like my MP3s.

So now I can lose my whole system completely and be back up and running in less than a day like nothing happened.

I also back up my iBook monthly because I download all of my email on it. Incidentally, Mac OS X Mail allows me to keep mail on the server for 30 days until it's deleted, so I have a backup there too. The side bonus is that I can read my mail anywhere with the web email client because it's still on the server. But I digress ....

Laptops are even more important to back up because you can lose them at any time. Stolen, dropped, thrown, drowned in coffee ... you never know. Put your CD burner to good use and make backups!