Learn from my mistake. Back up your data.

In twenty years of computing, I've never seen a hard-drive failure... until now. A couple of days ago, a relatively new 160 gigabyte drive burned out with no warning or prior degradation of performance. The lost games and other media are the tip of the iceberg. Work-related files, like scanned records, and a ton of correspondence and creative writing--going back more than ten years--were also lost. On the topic of ROM collecting, many of the games can be replaced, of course; but save files cannot be replaced. Fortunately, I always keep my Operating System and important programs on a separate, smaller drive (a clever habit, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be able to type this). But it's not enough. This could have been a minor loss...if I'd made backups.