Hello,
What is the best way to protect your coins?
Somewhere safe?
Is there any way to backup your wallet if your computer crashes?
This depends on the wallet. If your wallet does not allow you to make backup you can allways use another one and send all the coins there.
Somewhere safe...What are the best practics for protection?..
Offline, physical secure and multiple copies. IMHO the best way currently is to have one (or more) paper wallet(s) that allow n of m. So you have 3 parts of a paper wallet and any 2 pieces can generate you the private key you need to spend the coins. This allows you to store those wallets in several places and any one of your secure stashes can be compromised without you loosing your coins.
https://www.bitaddress.org allows this. Its called split wallet. But do not generate the keys online unless you just want to test it with a little amount.
Get their code
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org or any other code that suits your needs and generate the keys on an offline machine. To ensure that the keys are not compromised later you can use a live linux to boot from.
More on bitaddress can be found here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43496.0
