That depends on whether or not you still have data from 07 you want/need. I’ll tell you what I find to be a really great solution is online backup systems like Mozy.com. It’s completely hands-free, you set it to back up every 12 or 24 hours, or however frequently you want (choose according to how often you save new stuff; I used every 12 hours) and it does it automatically for you – you don’t even have to push a single button, it knows when it’s supposed to backup your system and it automatically does it. Not only is it hands-free but it’s all offsite so if (God forbid it ever happen) your house caught on fire or flooded, you don’t have to worry about losing your external backup system (if that’s what you’re using). It’s $5.00 month for unlimited storage and a very reliable and well-known service. If something ever happens to your computer, with the click of a couple of buttons Mozy will restore it all for you. Here’s a write-up I did on Mozy on my IM blog a while back http://imconnections.com/online-backup-for-your-computer-185 …I still use it to this day and I LOVE IT. I always feel safe and secure knowing no matter what, my data is SAFE at all times and I don’t have to do a thing.

You shouldn’t really be keeping “duplicates” per se, whenever you backup your files (if you’re doing it manually/with an external drive, etc.) you should be overwriting all of the existing data on the drive so that only files currently on your computer are on there – unless you have some old stuff you don’t want to have on your computer but you do want to have on an external drive for retrieval later if need be. So whenever you clean out old files from your computer, the old files are also cleaned out from your backup drive when you overwrite the old stored data with the most recent data. I hope that makes sense? Most people generally only need one copy unless you really have some serious stuff on there or just want to be super duper safe – in which case you might consider a backup service like Mozy (or another one) plus use an external drive of your own so that you have a copy at home on your external drive and a copy off site with a data storage center.

Hope that helps, please do let us know if you have more questions…happy to help!
Karen J.