There's a
nice post at Palm Addicts today with lots of info about why you need to do backups even though you have a hotsync, and it even includes many freeware options. Personally I use BackupBuddyVFS with a daily automatic scheduled backup to move everything in memory to my SD card, and then I move the SD card backup to my PC every week. (More often if something significant changes on the device. I also keep a full backup when I install new programs just in case they cause conflicts, or don't get removed properly when I delete the app. So far, this approach has made my device quite a bit more stable and reliable, so it's been worth the extra effort.)