My stock answer to this is to say

TWO DRIVES

I routinely use TWO drives or more.

First drive, for C drive will hold ONLY software such as Word, Windows, or Linux and OpenOffice. The Second or other drive is used to hold ANY and ALL data created. This limits much of the problems with messed up drives. The second or higher drives (except for ones holding Audio/Video data) would probably want to be partitioned for specific types of files.

My feeling on this is that the C drive gets worked to death. IF a problem develops, it will hit the drive with the operating system and application software.

The data drives will have less of a problem as it doesn't get written to as often as the operating system one. Drives are relatively inexpensive, so this sort of thing is easy to do, and not as much of a hardship as losing the data.

Another suggestion, get started with using Solid State Memory cards and multi-interfaced card readers. As a method of supplying information to others, this is an excellent method. Memory cards are getting up to 1G size, and 256 Meg cards are pretty popular in various formats. This allows transferring even audio files to be easily handled, and with the 1G cards, you could alao do Video! Think about them.