In the last year I lost two laptops and one portable hard-drive. Lost, I mean drives died on me pretty suddenly. One laptop was Sony Vaio, 6 months old. My girlfriend killed it with a skillful splash of red wine.

It was an accident so there was no point to get mad or blame, so I just

,

her, and bought myself a new laptop. Sony was a total piece of crap anyway. I will never buy a VAIO again.

I have ASUS M51 now. Nice machine.
If I were to buy a laptop now I'd buy Lenovo W500 (T9400, 4GB 1066Mhz RAM, ATI FireGL V5700, 15.4" monitor with 1680x1050, spill proof keyboard, magnesium roll cage, 7 hours of battery life time, 2.8kg). That is one hellofa business machine! A bit pricey (2900 swiss frankies), but a real performer. And it looks business, too.
Now I have also learned to buy high-density USB drives with rubber around them (I have 16GB Corsair FlashVoyager) that I fill with "mission-critical" data and store somewhere safe and not close to electric devices. I also have a portable HD as redundancy, stored a bit closer to my work table.

Some things are stored in my phone (I have 8GB card in it).
I've learned that when sh!t hits the fan you can never have too much redundancy!
ALso, I am waiting for Intel to finally release their fantastic SSDs (I read
www.anandtech.com regularly, a bit of tech fan). I don't care if it costs 800 bucks for 160GB, I get one. I NEED SPEED!
