Everyone needs to backup their data. No matter what’s on your Mac, if you lose files, you’ll be in a pickle. You may be able to work solely in the cloud, using services such as Dropbox, Google Docs, or Microsoft Office, but there are still essential files on your Mac.
Kirk’s first law of data protection is this: “It’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when.” If you’re lucky, and if you upgrade your computers frequently enough, you may never see disk failure, but trust me: it eventually happens.
Read the rest of the article on Macworld.