Some people are fine with backing up files just every month after reconciling. But if you follow this advice, you may have to reenter as much as a month's worth of data if the computer crashes toward the end of the month. If this thought bothers you, consider backing up more frequently. If you have really heavy transaction volumes — if you write hundreds of checks a month, for example — you may want to back up as often as twice a week.

Quicken periodically prompts you to back up when you try to exit. (You'll see a message that basically says, "Friend, backing up is a darn good idea.") You can, of course, choose to ignore this message. Or you can take Quicken's advice and do the backup thing.

You know what else? Here's a secret feature of Quicken: Quicken adds a subdirectory to the Quicken directory named Backup. And it'll stick a backup copy of your files in this directory every few days.