Automatic backup
Backing up your data is essential. Harddrives fail, a virus may strike, whatever the cause may be, the effect is that all your hard work, videos and irreplacable images are gone.
Ideally a procedure for backing up should be automatic. This means that it will not be forgotten at the crucial moment.
The first stage to starting automatic backup is to identify exactly what data needs to be backed up. Generally this will be email, videos, images and documents. If you are on windows then you already have an option available free of charge it is windows backup. Alternatively you can decide to backup mostly online, storing images on places such as flickr and switching to an online email client e.g. gmail and backing up the rest of your data online in xdrive. This pushes off the burden of ensuring your data is safe off to the provider. Note however this may not be an option if you have a slow internet connection or too much data.
If you are backing up yourself, then consider burning your data to dvd and putting them in a safe location, ideally in a separate location from your computer. This will mitigate the issue of a fire or theft at your primary data site from losing you all your data.
If you are not sure about what data is best to backup then it may be better to take a system image, note though that this will use up the most space as it will copy everything
Looking for a commercial solution which covers many bases Norton has Norton 360