You should always make a backup before doing any type of major restructuring of the hard drive. Iomega's Zip drive, Jaz drive or some other brand of mass storage device. Using the Retrospect application, it performs a regularly scheduled backup, and my whole machine is backed up in fifteen minutes. A Zip drive uses a new drive technology invented by Iomega to compete with Syquest drives. Syquest drives are faster, but Zip drive disks are much sturdier and reliable.
Zip disks look like a floppy, only a little thicker, and they each hold a hundred megs.
We each have a 250 meg hard drive and they can be backed up on two Zip disks with Retrospect's compression turned on. This sounds like a great purchase for departments to make, especially for all the student records that departments typically store on hard drives. Iomega Zip disks have password protection by using the Iomega Tools application, so that even if the disks were lost or stolen, the data would be safe. You can use them for Mac or IBM, and they're very light and small, easy to carry around and use on more than one computer. This sounds much better than backing up onto dozens of floppies.