Well, I agree that backing up on another partition on the same hard drive won't make much difference.

The best is to back-up on DVD-RWs! I love my new writer becasue I can back up all my files easily rather than on many CD-RWs.

Well, ya 40GB HDDs are the norm now. But I can tell you it is very expensive to get a 80GB HDD from 40GB but it is only a few dollars more from 80GB to 120GB.