I can certainly sympathize with the crashing of hard disks. Over 5 years I had 3 crashed disks that I lost over 50 GB of data and while that normally isn’t a huge amount for lots of folks, for me it was a huge deal. Mp3s, images, photos, whole e-books, a lot of my sci-fi stuff. Plus it was data from 1997 till 2003 and you just can’t replace that. I didn’t use a computer at home from May 2003 till Sept 2006 and I was happy to have saved & stored some data across 10 cds.
When I got my current pc, the first thing I did was copy all the data from those 10 disks onto the hard drive and then store the cds in a cupboard. Then I copies a bunch of cds with just mp3s in them that I had bought after 2003. I have a 120 GB external drive now for my mp3s and, for the time being, around 2 seasons worth of Star Trek : Voyager episodes. I have downloaded a few movies and some other tv series episodes. I have backed up all these and the mp3s which I have downloaded from Sept 2006 onto writable dvds. I have about 25 gb worth of un-backed data also on my pc which I should back up into dvds by the end of the month. It’s a tedious task.
Too bad we can’t just back up data like DATA is backed up in Star Trek : TNG!
If I lost ANY of my stuff I would DIE. And then come back to life and FLIP OUT. And DIE again.