I was living on risky ground for far too long and as such finally got around to getting an external firewire backup drive. I have a 160 gig drive that is formatted for the OS and a 250 gig drive that is just free space. They both have been running for two years almost continuously and thank goodness none of them has crashed yet. But the real problem was a month or so ago when they both were full. I ran out of room and was keeping several gigs of my important files on my ipod in the mean time. This is very dangerous as the ipod gets bumped around a lot and those files could have been gone in one terrifying moment. Luckily I take care of my 'pod and all my important stuff is backed up on my nice shiny 320GB firewire drive. I feel much more secure as a person now, thank heaven for techmology!