Mac users - how do you back up your data?

[franch]

Had this Mac ages, still no backup

What's the simplest way? Via memory stick or something? Will I be complicating things if I try to automate it, or should I just make sure I'm religious about making a copy on a regular basis?

Mainly want to backup my Entourage data (a rather large address book, emails etc), Word documents and maybe some photos. No idea how much memory that would require.

We have a mac although I am by no means the expert on it - have you upgraded to Leopard as that has an automatic backup facility that dp has raved about. We use an external usb hard disk (esp for our photos & videos) btw.

Yes, exactly what accessorize said. Time Machine which is part of Leopard and an external drive.

I use Macs professionally and always back up to external hard drives. We use Lacie drives but there are all sorts on the market and they don't cost much. You should always keep 2 copies in 2 different places..eg, 1 on the desktop, 1 on the hard drive. It's really easy to save just drag and drop or you can use a program like chronosync that makes sure you do not duplicate or overwrite but to be honest that is probably not necessary for a home user.

thanks all