It is always a good idea to have a full backup of all your data before installing *any* beta or new release software. Beta means that there are still bugs in the program, and those could lead to serious system errors, causing a loss of data. New releases are often less buggy than Beta software, but they still have not be tested fully on a huge number of machines. There could be a bug that wasn’t caught in the beta phase that causes big problems for your hard drive.

It is good advice to wait two weeks or so before installing recently released software to make sure that it is stable, and allow the company time to correct any issues that come up.