Depends... what exactly are you wanting to be prepared for?
If its just to keep your data, home directory, etc backed up, you could consider creating a seperate partition, or installing an additional hard disk or something like that.
It's wise to do that.
Can you explain what the purpose is?
I'm no linux expert but I've been around several different operating systems for many years - including Linspire, SuSE and Knoppix flavours of Linux recently - and when I used to coach CAD operators one-on-one I could never reinforce the idea enough to "backup, backup, backup"