If your PC's hard disk (or the entire system itself) suffers from a serious crash that leaves the data on the drive beyond recovery, you'll be thankful for putting some of your upgrade budget towards a backup drive.
This is essentially a super-sized hard disk in a chassis that connects to your PC using USB 2.0 or FireWire. A backup drive usually has a simple button on the front panel that launches some supplied backup software and copies your most precious files onto the drive. You can also use a drive "imaging" utility such as Norton Save & Restore, Acronis True Image or Windows Vista's own Complete PC Backup feature to take a digital "snapshot" of the drive - every bit and byte of data.
Seagate and Maxtor both have superb one-button backup drives but our current favourite is Western Digital's My Book Premium, which sells for about $350 with a 500GB drive.
About Acronis:
Acronis is a global cyber protection company delivering the only natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and infrastructure management platform for managed service providers and IT departments. Acronis solutions are designed to identify, protect, detect, respond, recover and govern IT deployments, ensuring data integrity and business continuity.
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 60+ countries. Acronis Cyber Platform is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 21,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses. Learn more at www.acronis.com.