diff --git a/docs/guides/main.rst b/docs/guides/main.rst
index 63e0f49c5..f5f1118e1 100644
--- a/docs/guides/main.rst
+++ b/docs/guides/main.rst
@@ -184,6 +184,11 @@ here, including the directory and file naming scheme. See
 Importing Your Library
 ----------------------
 
+The next step is to import your music files into the beets library database.
+Because this can involve modifying files and moving them around, data loss is
+always a possibility, so now would be a good time to make sure you have a
+recent backup of all your music. We'll wait.
+
 There are two good ways to bring your existing library into beets. You can
 either: (a) quickly bring all your files with all their current metadata into
 beets' database, or (b) use beets' highly-refined autotagger to find canonical