Since I've added USB to my A4000 I've taken to copying the contents of the entire drive to a flash drive. If a drive fails it's easy to recover.
BTW, Denny's book still has great tips and covers the OS up to 3.0. I worked for Denny and wrote articles for most of the magazines he edited. If you've got an XBox you'll find that Denny is still offfering Tips and Secrets. Last I checked he was the chief game guy at Microsoft in Redmond....
