Best Practices for Using Photoshop (and Computing in General)

Question

I've been seeing some threads that lead me to realize that not everyone knows the best practices for doing Photoshop on a computer, and in doing conscientious computing in general.  I thought it might be a good idea for those of us with some exprience to contribute and discuss best practices for making the Photoshop and computing experience more reliable and enjoyable.
It'd be great if everyone would contribute their ideas, and especially their personal experience.
Here are some of my thoughts on data integrity (this shouldn't be the only subject of this thread):
Consider paying more for good hardware. Computers have almost become commodities, and price shopping abounds, but there are some areas where spending a few dollars more can be beneficial.  For example, the difference in price between a top-of-the-line high performance enterprise class hard drive and the cheapest model around with, say, a 1 TB capacity is less than a hundred bucks!  Disk drives do fail!  They're not all created equal.  What would it cost you in aggravation and time to lose your data?  Imagine it happening at the worst possible time, because that's exactly when failures occur.
Use an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS).  Unexpected power outages are TERRIBLE for both computer software and hardware.  Lost files and burned out hardware are a possibility.  A UPS that will power the computer and monitor can be found at the local high tech store and doesn't cost much.  The modern ones will even communicate with the computer via USB to perform an orderly shutdown if the power failure goes on too long for the batteries to keep going.  Again, how much is it worth to you to have a computer outage and loss of data?
Work locally, copy files elsewhere.  Photoshop likes to be run on files on the local hard drive(s).  If you are working in an environment where you have networking, rather than opening a file right off the network, then saving it back there, consider copying the file to your local hard drive then working on it there.  This way an unexpected network outage or error won't cause you to lose work.
Never save over your original files.  You may have a library of original images you have captured with your camera or created.  Sometimes these are in formats that can be re-saved.  If you're going to work on one of those files (e.g., to prepare it for some use, such as printing), and it's a file type that can be overwritten (e.g., JPEG), as soon as you open the file save the document in another location, e.g., in Photoshop .psd format.
Save your master files in several places.  While you are working in Photoshop, especially if you've done a lot of work on one document, remember to save your work regularly, and you may want to save it in several different places (or copy the file after you have saved it to a backup folder, or save it in a version management system).  Things can go wrong and it's nice to be able to go back to a prior saved version without losing too much work.
Make Backups.  Back up your computer files, including your Photoshop work, ideally to external media.  Windows now ships with a quite good backup system, and external USB drives with surprisingly high capacity (e.g., Western Digital MyBook) are very inexpensive.  The external drives aren't that fast, but a backup you've set up to run late at night can finish by morning, and if/when you have a failure or loss of data.  And if you're really concerned with backup integrity, you can unplug an external drive and take it to another location.
This stuff is kind of "motherhood and apple pie" but it's worth getting the word out I think.
Your ideas?
-Noel

Answer 1

APC Back-UPS XS 1300.  $169.99 at Best Buy.
Our power outages here are usually only a few seconds; this should give my server about 20 or 25 minutes run-time.
I'm setting up the PowerChute software now to shut down the computer when 5 minutes of power is left.  The load with the monitor sleeping is 171 watts.
This has surge protection and other nice features as well.
-Noel