"Many articles written on this site and others tell you how important it is to keep information backed up. Right now you are using your computer. Do you feel comfortable if a power surge zaps your hard drive or your hard drive in general decides to die? Even if you answered yes, it is always helpful to inspect a new tool. BackupPC is free and open source. It runs on Linux and there are probably repos to download it for your distribution. Don't let that fool you. BackupPC can save many different workstations including WinXX all the way to anything that runs rsyncd. "