No, I was not on Hoarders. 5000 emails takes up only 1 Gb of space (including attachments). These are emails received since 1999. In 1999 I had a hard drive fail and at that time I lost 4 years of email.
Every month (or so) I back up the following on an external hard drive which is never connected to my laptop except when backing up:
1. all files in "My Documents" (Word, Excel, WordPerfect and QuattroPro)
2. bookmarks, favorites in several browsers
3. and lastly, all my email. I don't save spam or advertising which is 90% of all incoming email.
Also, I don't save programs as I have them on CD or can get them online.
Right now my external hard drive has 10Gb of data on it.
I have used my back-up ONLY once. What a relief it was to know that almost everything was saved. I used to save almost everything that was on paper. Now the only thing I save are legal and quasi-legal documents.
