[jyl]

I agree with 928ram. Why not move her files to the D: logical drive and set the preferences in her applications to save new files there, thereby using that 35GB of space? Saves you $50, which you can put toward an external hard drisk drive and backup software.

Whatever you decide to do, I would definitely get a backup solution.

Story: A month ago, my wife's laptop wouldn't boot up. After hours of cursing, I got it to boot once, and immediately updated the backup. We use a 120GB external Firewire hard drive with Retrospect software. The laptop then died for good. Turned out the hard drive had failed and all the data was non-recoverable. Since this included all our music files and every digital photo we've taken for the last three years of the kid's childhood, my wife let me know that my fate hung in the balance. If my backup failed -> death (suddenly it was "my" backup). Fortunately, the backup worked perfectly, restored the entire state of the machine (apps, data, caches, preferences, passwords, O/S patches, everything - even which files I had open) as if nothing had happened. (Which success was now credited to "our" backup).

I recommend using an external hard drive (burning multiple CDs or DVDs is a tedious task that you're likely to skip or not do often enough, and you can only back up your data), leaving it connected to the machine (assuming her has a desktop), using backup software that does incremental backups (only copies what has changed, rather than copying the full 50GB each time) and allows you to schedule unattended backups (e.g. in the middle of the night), and using multiple backup sets (e.g. one week backup to set A, the next week to set B, the next week to set A - so if one set happens to be corrupt, you have another set just a week older).

Edit: sorry, I posted before I read your post above. Well, she can still use an external hard drive (her laptop surely has USB ports), she'd just have to get in the habit of plugging the drive in once a week and starting the backup app.

Oh by the way, this still leaves you (and me) vulnerable to a real catastrophe - house burns down, destroying the computer and the backup. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with that? E.g. online backup sites?