I got my hard drive last night...all 300GB of it and installed the USB 2.0 card in the server.  I've now got 57GB of term papers, music, email and most importantly pictures all safe and sound on a removable drive!  I'm liking the piece of mind!  I've got a cron job set to run every night at 1:00 am that will do the rsync..that just means it will only copy the files that have been changed..not the new ones.  Now I feel safe and secure...