Why do I need a bootable copy of my hard drive?

A little while ago I got a little too enthusiastic about reclaiming space on the drive and mistakenly deleted my Receipts folder. So far the eMac is fine, but I've been advised I should perform an archive and reinstall of the system, and, just in case, to make a bootable backup of my hard drive first, and to buy an external hard drive that could make such a copy.
My question is why I need a bootable copy of the hard drive. I'm a light user (internet, Quicken, no video games, movies or graphics processing), and after deleting duplicate mp3 files, unused printer drivers, stripping unneeded languages from programs, and cleaning out those un-deleted files left after deleting programs, I'm down to 13G used on my 40G hard drive (and the old beast just whizzes around). I can save that much stuff on my (new) 16G USB drive, which won't be bootable. So, why should I worry about bootability?

You know, I think you're right. I'm marking this solved because you just validated my thought. My to-do list is long enough without hovering over a hard drive for a couple of evenings and hoping and praying I do things right.
The Apple store is open today, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow and toddle over to our local Mac reseller (buy local-ish!) and pick up something that's plug-n-play. And, even though I've only got a 40G drive, and about 20G to back up, I'll probably end up buying something bigger (and partition a small volume for my backup) so that when I finally do buy a new computer I'll already have a backup drive.
Message was edited by: litterbuggy

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