sweet... and yet so easy
One step further for the brave amongst you, armed with screwdrivers! Install a second hard drive and direct My Documents to it. Then you know all your data is separated and if you need to reinstall, you can overwrite drive c: without a second thought. Or if you upgrade, just remove the second drive and pop it in your new PC.
There are only two types of hard drive: Dead and Dying! It's a mechanical unit and is wearing out as soon as it is turned on.
Jon, we use RAID in our servers as well and with RAID 1 (basic mirroring) you're not screwed if one disk goes down. It's true that windows doesn't see two disc but if one dies, you can "break" your RAID and use the disk as a normal one.We actually had to do it no later than last week when the master disk of SQL2000 server died. But, as we both said, it's not backup solution, RAID is only good to reduce down time when you have a hard disk failure.