http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/rescuedisk

Free effective external scan, does wonders for cleanup of all sorts of evilware.

Thanks for the link - trying to diagnose a friend's royally messed-up laptop... I'm wagering hardware fault, it's either that or some really nasty malware.

Kaspersky's tool to write the ISO to USB flashdrive is severely retarded, though, it can't handle neither 16- or 8gig drives. 32bit arithmetic bug?

You know what thing we need to add to our "kit" of tools recommended for dealing with data loss situations is: A second PC.

+1.  And maybe a second router too.  When my router failed, it was a pain to even order another one.  Without Internet access, it's getting very hard to do anything with computers, from finding help to ordering parts.

I think an important way to think about backing up stuff is to consider what you are protecting yourself AGAINST.

I make full drive images to protect myself against a hard drive failure, or a malware attack; in such a scenario the only good option is to restore the entire operating system and all installed programs to a known good state.  The odds of this happening are very low on a day to day basis, so I don't do this very often -- perhaps once a month.  I try to do this to external drives which are only connected for this purpose.

I have versioned document backups running in real time, onto a separate hard drive mounted on my pc; I do this to protect myself from accidentally deleted a file i later realize i need, or making changes to a document that i realize i shouldn't have, etc.  This has to run all the time.

Now this dual approach takes care of most of my WORRIES.  However, I have recently forced myself to use an online backup system.  Even though I dislike the speed of such a thing, I am forcing myself to use it because it's the only protection I have against a fire or robbery that would result in the PHYSICAL loss of both my computer and my onsite backup drives, or against the unlikely scenario of a voracious malware that struck while my backup drives were connected.  This is a very low risk event, but the total catastrophic loss that would result from it is enough to scare me into using an online backup solution.

Keeping an old ENCRYPTED full drive image at a friends house (or safety deposit box) is also a good protection against robbery+fire.

So this begs another question may be in another thread, beside the big usual places (newegg, etc.) where can I find cheap external hds shipped to Canada?

^ Thanks for bumping that.  It looks quite interesting.