Backing up
Well, I don't have a Mustang, but can offer some backup advice. Unless you just enjoy doing it, don't try to do RAID at home. RAID is great for business data centers and network file servers, where you can't tolerate any downtime. The advantage of a RAID array is that the system can tolerate the complete failure of any of the drives by reconstructing data on the fly, and keep running while you "hot swap" the bad drive - the enclosure is made so that you can pull the old drive out, plug the new one in, never have to shut down, and then the software will rebuild the data on the new drive. Works great - but it is complex. For home use, I would never do it. I have an external hard drive that is about three times as big as my laptop drive. I back everything up to it: operating system and all, so that if I had to I could boot off that drive and have all my data there. It backs up every night. Then I use the rest of the space for iTunes files, photos (which are also copied to CD or DVD), whatever. If there is a fire, I can grab that drive on my way out of the house. And it's dead simple: the simpler the process, the more likely I am to do it.
On a side note: you can download (for very much FREE, although it is nice to donate) a program suite called OpenOffice. This is an open-source product that gives you a spreadsheet program, a word processor, and a presentation tool, much like that expensive one which comes from Redmond. I have the real MS Office on my system, but for anyone who can't shell out the big bucks, or needs something in an emergency, OpenOffice can open, read, and save MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Did I mention it's free?