Sanddog has the right idea...those "side drives", as we call them in my household, are now WAY cheaper than they once were. Once they were a luxury; now they are a necessity.

I also counsel folks that they ought to seriously consider backing up their data AND OS and replacing the internal drive of the computer at some point...you sort of know that you're living on borrowed time after a while and, again, drives are cheap these days so it ought to be considered a sort of routine maintenance. I usually manage to wrench at least five or six years out of a Mac without any problems. Right now I'm on an eMac that's going on six years old with no hardware problems or crashes ever...so I got that goin' for me, which is nice. I'm about to do a "hard drive transplant" and memory upgrade on this one so I can eke a couple more years out of it.

Hard drive recovery is also less expensive than it used to be but it's still costly.

Whenever you're not sure about backing up your files...especially the photographs...just remember the last words of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from Blade Runner...

"...all those memories gone...like tears in the rain..."

Best

AA