I've been struggling with this dilemma for a while now: I have backed up my entire hard drive about three times and on each backup I have my iPhoto library. Most times I backed up because I was traveling or was in a hurry and didn't think about how to get some of the info off of the hard drive. The last time I did a clean install I decided that the 60 gig hard drive in my laptop was just not enough, so now I keep all my music and photos on an external 350 gig drive which works great, except that my photo library reaches only as far back as a few months ago.