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got a couple of free usb keys with some dell computers I ordered for work and they are cooool 64Mb solid state storage - hot plug into any usb port - tiny size - fantastic!

we have been using firewire drives in the office, 80 gb, with firewire and usb transfer, and they are well small, they are coool as well

gonna get me some of those usb drives for backing up - any tips on backup software (thinking about tapeware but configged for HDs). Also thinking of getting a dual-processor pc from dell to act as a file server so we can all share projects but they're pretty pricey - any better suppliers out there? Like the Rusky news sites!

just get a dell dimension 4550 - i just got one to be an office server - load slackware and use the provided KDE 3.0 for the desktop - very friendly, all configuration can be done with nice little window applications. for backup in linux you can use Amanda or the builtin unix command 'dd' which copies file but when applied to a partition/drive makes an image of that partition/drive. so slap in a second hard drive and away you go. if you give everyone in the office a user account on the linux box you can make their windows machines map their unix home directory to a drive when they boot. Then in Outlook change the store directory to their home directory on the server and you can easily backup their mail. the only stuff you miss then is the user's windows address book (*.wab) and web browser bookmarks as you may have guessed I am implementing all this myself at the moment PS when you are installing linux I would recommend setting up the following separate partitions to make backup easy: 4Gb for os "/" 1Gb for users "/home" big Gb for work data "/gpco_canada" "/gpco_scotland" etc however many separate data dirs you need to keep them a reasonable size and if you need to run a windows app then run vmware I have it running msdev studio very nicely (i can provide any installation requirements you may have) NEXT!