New to Mame & Mamewah: Best way to backup system/learn about directories

[retrohead80]

Hi guys. I'm new to the forum and new to MAME and Mamewah. I just bought an arcade cabinet with Mame & other emulators installed and Mamewah as a front end. I'm already paranoid about backing everything up just in case. What safeguards do you think I should put in place to stop the loss of roms, emulators and other neccessary files?. I have thought about purchasing an external hard drive with decent storage capacity to keep all relevant files on to backup in case of a disaster.
I'm not too knowledgeable about file and directory structures in both mame and mamewah either....could someone point me towards any helpful newbie guides that would show me how to reassemble things if the worst happened?.

[kaptainsteve]

Get an external drive and put copy the whole she-bang on it.    This way, when you crash or lose a hard drive, just copy and paste it right back.