DMGBackups: HOWTO
Fred aptly points out that there's more of an attitude in JWZ's blog post on backups than is helpful. So I thought I'd go ahead and put something together here.
Fred also said it really well: Every hard drive will eventually crash. And when he says "crash," he means total, unrecoverable hardware failure. Say g'night, Gracie.
So here's how I do it.
I have two 500GB USB hard drives. I keep one connected to my computer all the time.
I keep the second in a locked drawer at work, and bring it home once in a while (once a month is good) to synchronize it with the first hard drive. Then it goes back to its drawer at work. This way, if my house burns down, I still have all my data.
And that's it. Done. Finito. Easy.
[UPDATE] This system is great for backing up your files, but there is a better way. I've posted about it here.