After the CD caught fire in my CD-RW I did buy this DVD-RW on eBay but I think it's defective and the vendor I bought it from doesn't seem to want to take it back. He just keeps emailing me back saying "non garantie" whatever that means.
I do have a second hard drive in my PC but it has Windows 3.1 on it in case Windows XP and Windows 98 happen to fail at the same time.
So for now I've just been backing everything up on floppy disks. I know they only hold 1.44MB so what I've been doing is making a backup of every file on the PC that's 1.44MB or smaller. If there's a crash I'm hoping it only affects the files I've backed up already.
I did luck out in one way though. When the CD caught fire [or exploded, I can't really tell what actually happened because the door on the CD burner melted shut] I panicked and I threw the Bloody Mary I was drinking on it to put out the flames. If I had been drinking a Long Island Ice Tea or a Kamikazee like I usually do that would have made the fire a lot worse .