When your hard drive finally crashes, you’ll regret not having a recent backup of your hand histories, photos, electronic statements, and MP3s. But backing up onto CD-Rs or DVD-Rs is a pain in the ass and an environmental disaster. And while a month-old snapshot is better than nothing, why not work off the latest version of your files?

The most convenient way to perform back-ups is to use another hard drive. With a second hard drive, you can use a program like Second Copy to perform daily automated back-ups of the files you want to preserve without having to insert blank media 72 times. There’s a deal for a 250GB Seagate internal hard drive at Fry’s Outpost.com — only $69.99 after rebate, which is 1 cent per GB cheaper than the Seagate I bought back in July.

I’m tempted to get it myself, but I actually already have an external hard drive I use for back-ups, and I think I’m about to spend a lot of money on a clutch repair job.