of course the other thing you can do if you have important emals is to dump the mail file up to a webspace somewhere. That way if your house burns down you still have those emails!
Same goes for any important pictures, data etc.
One other option which I thought of th eother day is to have a co-op of friends where you give up some hard disk space to someone else. e.g. lets say I give up 2 gig of disk space on my laptop for len to store his important info in. he in turn gives up 2 gig for say Mick who stores 2 gigs of Harwood reds who stores 2 gig of mine. That way, no cost implications, resilience of data sroage is improved. You can improve this again by sharing your data across say 2 other PCs..