I downloaded the latest JED Editor's Pick JoomlaPack to backup my Joomla! sites and once I got through the initial hiccups to get it to work the backup was a breeze.

Why backup your Joomla! site regularly?

Well, the recent hackattack should make that obvious (even though your host may have been able to restore your site like mine did on one of the sites) but that's not the only reason:

• Server crash may cause you to lose your data
• You may want to duplicate a site to make for easier set up of a similar new site
• You may want to move to a new hosting service

JoomlaPack is available for both Joomla! 1.5 Native and Joomla! 1.0.x 

A couple of issues that had to be overcome before it worked:

• the com_joomlapack folder in administrator/components must be writable as well as the temp folder in it,
• the joomlapack config file is only created after saving the options although the impression is that it should be there from the start.
• One table is not created with the installation of the current version so you have to create it in phpAdmin
  
  CREATE TABLE `jos_jp_packvars` (`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `key` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, `value` varchar(255) default NULL, `value2` LONGTEXT, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) );