one thing caught my eye in particular here. the “backed up to external drive.” i too was a strong supporter of this, until my powerbook was in the shop getting the lid fixed ( of course, i never send a drive with my data on it out into the world ) and my external drive started making a lot of beeping noises. i lost a lot of work, thankfully no baby pictures. if data is important, make more than one type of backup. external drive + dvd. dvd + backup server. whatever + whatever, as long as there is more than one copy in the world, even when one copy disappears suddenly. also, i use pgp disks to burn to dvd-r. that way even if you have my dvd, you have to crack 256-AES to get the info.

just another “total system” pointer. =) love the site!