Oh, hon, I so understand. I just got my laptop back today from having to send it back to Apple to have the hard drive replaced after it crashed last week. Lost everything that wasn't on my USB stick drive. Fics, chats, freelance projects, applications. :(

*hugs you hard*

I highly reccommend getting a stick drive. They're inexpensive compared to a external HD and do well with backing up text documents especially. You can get them up to 1 GB, I believe. Look around for a good price though...you can find them fairly cheap at times.