There are still people out there that think they will never suffer a crash, their Mac will never get stolen, their house will never burn down, etc.... So why make backups ? My data is safe!
Those people are WRONG! It doesn't matter if you are one of those people or not, keep reading just to make sure you are making your backups right :)

It's not a question of if, it's a question of when your hard drive will fail. Eventually all hard drives fail, it could be 10 month or 10 years but it will fail. Why? All hard drives (with the exception of the new SSD or Solid State drives) are made up out of moving parts. Moving parts eventually wear down and break.

When it breaks it sucks. But if you have proper backups it is just a very minor set back. Hard drives these days are very cheap so all it will take to get back up and running again is some time and a few bucks. Don't think you are off the hook if you have an SSD hard drive, they can fail too.

How can you make a safe, reliable backup with the least amount of effort ? Here are my two favorite ways:

1. Time Machine.
Since 10.5 Leopard there has been Time Machine. If you use 10.5 Leopard or newer, you have no excuse at all not to make backups.

2. Carbon Copy Cloner.
An amazing application that will let you make a clone (identical copy) of your entire hard drive. Unlike Time Machine it's not automated but it is Bootable. Meaning that if your hard drive crashes you can just plug in the clone drive, boot up from it and carry on doing what you're doing. This as a temporary solution until your internal drive is replaced, then you can clone the whole system back. For more information click here.

Each of the above will create a good, reliable backup, it is up to you which one to choose/use. Dragging the contents of your hard drive to an external drive is NOT a reliable backup.

For really important data you might also consider off-site backups, after all if your office were to burn down it will also burn your backup drive with the above two options. Therefore a backup to an off-site server would be ideal.

Don't become a victim... MAKE BACKUPS! ;)

If you are really concerned about your backups you can make double backups by using a RAID hard drive to have a backup of your backup..