I'm completely loaded with external HDs - got 6 of them and a little teeny 60GB portable jobbie to shuttle images back and forth from the warehouse to home if I wanna work on them here.

As soon as you finish a shoot, back those images up on something other than your everyday computer! When THAT drive fills up, buy another!

I've had ONE HD die on me, and it had a LOT of commercial work on it - $847 later (from a data retrieval company) and I had most of it back - now I back things up as soon as I'm done shooting them - you're right - you can never be too careful.
-Lew ;-)