If you are a home-user for pleasure or play, I'd say backup the drive about 2x a month.
It is important to remember to backup your drive frequently. This way, if anything happens to the notebook's drive, I can restore it back to the computer without any problems. Immediately upon setup of the new computer (just as I had with the previous one) I immediately backed up everything, operating system and all on the new 1.5TB hard drive. This past Christmas, DH and his family got together to purchase me a new Dell Studio 1745 notebook with 17.3 screen and a WB external 1.5TB hard drive. The first is a 500GB drive, which did wonders on the previous Gateway model that was dying a slow pain-ridden death & driving me up the wall because it kept crashing. The one sure fire way to save your original factory settings on a new computer or an old one is to purchase an external hard drive such as the ones made by Western Digital.
