Another (possible) reason you should backup your HD every month.
I recently purchased a PowerBook Duo 280c on LowEndMac's swap list. I was so excited to finally get it home! I played with it for a while and then went to bed.
The next morning, I woke up and used it more. It was fun, even though I've used OS 7.6 many times before. Later that day, I wanted to see if the battery worked at all, just in case I was desperate to receive a fax stuck on the road without my power adapter. I put the battery in and it registered in the menu bar. Then, the PowerBook shut down. cold. I then removed the battery to attempt to start up again.
For those of you that remember, the boot sequence consisted of a chime, gray screen, then a smiling Mac icon, Welcome to Macintosh, then the startup. And when something minor goes wrong, you'd see a floppy disk with a flashing question mark. (Nowadays it's a folder and question mark) When something major goes wrong, you see a frowning Mac and an error code (to make it easy for techies to diagnose the problem). Well it turns out, that when I started mine up, the happy Mac would come on for a split second, then the floppy disk / flashing ?. and then the Sad Mac.
Anyone who's used a Duo before knows that there are virtually no ports on it. There's a docking port, a serial port, and a fax modem if you're lucky. I don't have any docking stations or floppy drives, so there is currently *no* way for me to install any data. And a friend suggested that I re-write the Mac OS onto the HD. Sounds good...
I didn't have anything important on there (How could I get data on it?) , but still - just goes to show you that you should listen to J when he says to back up your hard drive!
Oh, and later that day, the screen shattered from a heavy object falling on it. So for now it's completely useless.
For now, I've been Ian/macgeek0391/the OS X nerd , whatever you want to call me. O:-)
Happy new year's!