Sorry for the Justin Timberlake reference.  I’ll confess to not actually having heard his ‘hit’ single, so if that reference makes you want to throw up in your mouth, I’m even more apologetic.  That being said, please backup your hard drive today.  If you don’t have an external hard drive that gets backed up to on a regular basis, please stop what you’re doing, even at the risk of getting fired, and get one.  Get the external hard drive, copy your files from your internal hard drive onto the external hard drive.  Do it now.  Do it today, or if you must put it off, do it this weekend, but don’t put it off or else you could lose critical things like those blackmail pictures you have of your [insert being/entity/person/senator reference here] in their [insert some awkward piece of clothing here] while [insert embarrassing or illegal activity here].  Or you could just lose important documents like papers for school, papers for work, papers for church, or even worse, papers for the government.

If you’re running Windows XP you can tell it to backup all of your files automatically!  Just go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup.  Then follow the wizard.  Figure out if all of your valuable files are in your My Documents folders or if you want to backup the whole system and then set up a schedule.  Have it backup once a week or daily, but have it backup your computer or valuable files regularly.  Once that’s done you can rest knowing that unless your external hard drive fails you’ve at least got things preserved.

I setup a network wide backup at my house this week using an Airport Extreme USB connected external hard drive so that all computers backup onto one drive every night.  If I were more clever once a week/month I’d take a second external drive to my parents or some other ‘safe’ place and keep one there, too.  Just in case.

Sure, backing up data isn’t sexy, but its smart.  So listen to Justin Timberlake and backup at the same time, then you can be both.