Incredible as it may sound, I actually have spare time on my hands as the weather turns more tropical. This means now is an ideal time to attend to maintenance items on my computer.
There are several procedures that computers require on a regular basis if you want to avoid disasters in the future. Some are monthly, some three times a year and some vary relative to the value of the data on your computer. If you do not have these maintenance items set to occur automatically then now is the time to attend to them.
First, back up your hard drive. Not only should you back up files, you should keep a copy offsite. A few years ago I wrote about being thousands of miles from home and watching my neighbourhood in flames on TV, unable to contact anyone to tell them to rescue my computer. I did not lose anything but some of my neighbours lost everything. The community and insurance companies rallied to reassemble those people's lives, but backing up regularly and storing the backup in a safe deposit box or at a friend's house is the only way to ensure against losing years of work.
My favourite professional backup application is Retrospect (US$349) for workgroups on a network and Retrospect Desktop ($95) for individual machines. Retrospect is a little awkward to use but it is dependable and works with all Mac operating systems and peripherals.
Now is a good time to remind everyone that magnetic media (floppies, tape, Zip and Jazz disks, even removable hard drives) are not permanent storage methods. They can become corrupted in a few years.
If you are making things you wish to have for a long time - such as genealogy databases or poetry for your great, great grandchildren - I suggest putting your backups on a CD or DVD. These are more permanent (40+ years) and less expensive (about 50 US cents a CD - 640 megabytes, or $1.50 per DVD - 4.7 gigabytes) depending where you buy them and in what quantity. If you shop around, a good DVD/CD burner will cost about $250. It is also a good idea to store your important files along with the software that can read them. Forty years is a long time in computer technology years and if the documents make it that far into the future, someone will probably want to read them.