Back, back, back it up...

I had a ridiculous day at work which included an impromptu meeting with a case manager and a client which somehow stretched into three grueling hours.

After seeing a couple other clients and ending my day at around 8 PM, I was driving home. I was thinking to myself, "Damn, I'm glad today is over..." when all of a sudden another thought popped into my head. It said, "Don't take your normal route home... Take the route home which runs near the Best Buy, go in and get yourself a jump drive AND and external hard drive. You REALLY need to back up your hard drive, and you need to do it tonight."

Being a person who operates under the perpetual cloud of Murphy's law, I tend to listen to that intuitive little voice when it pipes up with something out of nowhere.

This means in all likelihood my computer will randomly decide to eat itself as I sleep tonight... Either that, or now that I have spent the money and taken the time to make sure that things are now backed up, it will run perfectly into perpetuity. (Personally, I'm thinking the smart money is on my computer eating itself... It may not be tonight, but it's gonna happen, and I can hardly wait!)

I have been needing to invest in an external hard drive for quite some time actually, but have continuously put it off until now... Something I was VERY unhappy about the last few times that my computer has decided to act like an obnoxious emo teenager and start self-mutilating. I spent more than a few hours mentally kicking my own ass (and the asses of those incompetent assholes on the Geek Squad) because technology has let me down, and I was too dumb or poor to invest in a backup system.

So this brings me to a couple of questions, and I'm using you fine folks as a straw poll population.

First off, do you guys back up? Nobody talks about this, but every time I've ever had a problem people look at me like I must've just crawled out from under a rock because apparently, under cover of night, EVERYBODY BACKS UP! WHERE HAVE I BEEN? And for you backer- uppers, how often do you back up? I mean now that I've made the investment I intend to back up EVERYTHING like every couple weeks or at least once a month... Is this too often? Is this too infrequent? Someone give me an idea! I just know I'm sick of losing my music library and my work documents!

Secondly, does anyone else have that intuitive voice? The one that seems to seldom say much, but the one that when it does, you know you better listen? The one that says, "Don't go left, TRUST ME, go right!" and in the dramatic example you find out that a crane would have fallen on you at the exact moment of your arrival on a given spot had you not listened to the voice and turned left anyway?" Is the intuitive voice more widespread, or am I just totally nuts? (If I'm nuts, you can just say so, because as I've noted before, I wouldn't be surprised if I was totally bonkers, but I own it because I don't know any other way to operate.)