Dr. Mac has excellent advice for preparation and post-op procedures for working with Mac OS X's Software Update in his latest column for Mac Design magazine. We admit we do not always back up prior to running software updates, but then again, we tend to let a few days go by after an update appears, seeing how the world outside our bowl fares with it. Regardless, it is good advice to at least back up your Home folder, or wherever you store your vital data on your drive, before running major updates, like the supposedly-forthcoming 10.3.6. It's a pain to have to rebuild your boot disk in the event of a major problem after an update, but it's quite another pain to lose irreplaceable data.