"Or maybe someone to stand over me and smack me whenever I start messing with the innards...."

:)

But on a serious note, I have until recently never had any form of backup.

I had three drives totaling 360 gigs, about 80% used. Recently I bought three 320 gig drives and removable rack/trays to put them in. One drive was used to back up all my data. The second was used for a fresh OS install.

The third is extra, but I am currently using it to experiment with backup techniques for use on bootable partitions. It's easy to click/drag whole drives to copy the data somewhere. It's another trick to restore a bootable system partition. I just love playing with low level disk editors, mucking about with partition tables and boot sectors. :)

Brian