ALWAYS have a
fully bootable image of your system disk (C drive) on another drive ....
If for whatever reason shit goes south (viruses, hardware failure, theft, whatever ..) you can be back up and running in the time it takes you to boot from the remote drive connected to another machine ...
It took me
4 times losing everything to realize this ...
120 GB SATA drive - $50
my time making a bootable system drive -$50 (one hour)
USB/SATA/PATA connector - $15
Being back online 15 minutes after disaster strikes - PRICELESS!! 
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