last year I bought an external hard drive and backed-up everything from my computer, which then died. With most of my purchased programs I just copied and pasted to the new comp. and they worked fine. Now I save everything to the ext drive, and I can also use it with the laptop when traveling. It's great, but I do wonder how long before it crashes.

Yes, as other have said, call them and they will help you. I did that awhile ago and they help me reinstall on a new computer.

I got my external hard drive from Staples, betw $20-$30.

The posts above are talking about an external dvd drive.