Are you looking to backup the entire contents of your hard drive or individual personal files?
Depending on your answer, there are a number of ways to back up you data/hard drive. If it's your ENTIRE drive (if you want your new hard drive to look exactly like your soon-to-be old one) you can "clone" it using either Symantec Ghost or PowerQuest DriveImage Pro. If it's just individual files, a few CD-Rs OR a Zip drive (if you have one) ought to do the trick