Snow Leopard Backup

Me being my stingy lazy old 14 year old self is thinking of upgrading to Snow Leopard. I have found in lots of places that backing up my data is a good thing to do. I am just too lazy and don't want to erase my precious hard drive to back up ALL my files. Do I have to backup my files if I want to keep them? Or is this just a precaution for some people? So if I don't back my files up will they get erased? Please help.

No they will not get erased when you upgrade, however I would never do such a thing without cloning my HDD first.

Almost all upgrades of SL will go just fine. Anytime you're talking about doing a major overhaul of the OS, partitioning a drive, etc., things can and do happen.

It's probably better than a 99.9% chance that you'll not have any issue. But be forewarned, it is possible for something to go wrong and you lose all your data. It's up to you and how important that data is or whether you like rolling the dice.

Just put in the DVD on my wife's machine while booted up in Leopard. Clicked on the install button and 45 minutes later, voila, she's up in SL with no problems at all. But, I still had a Time Machine backup just in case.

You don't have to erase all your files, but it's always best to backup if you treasure your data.