Here's something to think about with harddrives that should make even the most determined procrastinator start doing regular backups...
With HD sales, price is everything. The overwhelming majority of consumers will buy a cheaper, more poorly made HD as opposed to paying more for a better made one. All they see is the price.
In order to keep the price down, hard drives are built to the absolute minimum specifications - thinnest possible magnetic coating, least sensitive heads, etc. - that will allow for a working hard drive.
Hard drives COULD be built that would last for decades. But they aren't because no one would buy them. Instead they're built to the lowest possible standards that still gets them within specs.
So your hard drive WILL fail - it's not a matter of if, but when.
I have a factory refurb. hard drive (warranty replacement) that squeals - been working fine for over a year, but I fully expect it, and my other hard drive, to fail any day. Because I keep only backups on the second hard drive, and all my files on the first, if either fails I just go buy a new one and either restore the backup or make a new backup as soon as I install the replacement.
This is just another case of "one is none and two is one". Buy two hard drives at a time and use one for primary and one for backup image files only. I use Ghost on a boot floppy (two copies of that, too) to make backups on the second hard drive which is formatted with a FAT32 single partition - that way it's accessable by the DOS boot floppy that has Ghost on it even if the primary OS is down.