It always pays to have a good quality backup and imaging program. It pays to backup you hard drive on a regular basis. I use Acronis Trueimage (Trial Version Available) and would recommend it. Even brand new hard drives fail so it always pays to have a copy of your data stored on a cd or DVD. In my opinion it is worth partitioning your hard drive so as to have your operating system only on C: drive and all your personal files on another partition that way if you need to reformat C: Drive your data is safely out of the way on another partition.
Born2fly