The many excellent reasons for backing up are so well known that they are scarcely worth repeating here. Any IT manager with even an ounce of experience will have arranged some form of backup regime for their company's systems. Companies that are forced to operate without their data are unlikely to survive for any great length of time. The situation isn't quite as bad for individual home or small office users, but nevertheless any individual with any sense will have invested in some form of backup solution, or at least thought about it. Whether you already have a backup solution in place or not, it's important to keep up with the latest developments in backup technology, as your requirements will undoubtedly change in line with the evolution of your main computing hardware.
Popular misconceptions abound.
You'll occasionally hear people talking about the need to backup all of your application files offsite. This may sound like good advice. Once the burned or stolen computers have been replaced, the majority of software can easily be reinstalled from these. Indeed, with some software packages, it's next to impossible to restore the package itself from a backup without also restoring the entire operating system too. If all you want is to restore a clean copy of such software on your PC following a file corruption problem, making a backup of it using conventional backup technology can be a waste of time.