When I had my business I backed up every night and next day I took the backup to the bank and put it in my lockbox there. I also kept a copy of the backup in the ofice and rotated the backup tapes ( had a 9 track drive). That way the most I could lose would be one day's work. Really came in handy a time or 3. It pays to back up and keep a copy elsewhere, off premises.

Now, when I download cards, I copy to HD and make a copy to another drive. I have two internal drives and a 320 g external drive. Nothing goes on boot drive except OS and dlls, etc. My main drive is partitioned so that I have software on a different "drive" than other stuff. I use the second drive which has nothing on it besides photo files. I never work with original files, I copy files I want to work on to another directory and work on those. That way I always have 2 original copies. When I convert RAW files, I always convert to tiff files as jpg is lossy and every time you save them you lose data. If I am going to make different size prints or show on web, I copy each tif and resize it. I often have as many as 5 or 6 copies of each tif file. I might have a 5X7, an 8X10, 11X14, and the original size from the camera. sometimes I will make an album of the photos to present to someone. I also process the tif files; color, contrast, etc; before I convert to jpg if I need a jpg for some reason.

Also, I never use the camera to transfer files from card to puter. Card readers are inexpensive enough and they are faster than camera transfer. It pays to be careful and avoid heart attacks caused by deletion of precious files.
Michael :-)