Backup woes

I didn't get too far in my decluttering the past 2 days, but yesterday I was caught up in a computer mess which brought to mind many mistakes I have made. Luckily I have been backing up my computer on an external drive since last year's disk failure, but what are the odds that the backup and the main computer would both fail at the same time? Luckily, after a trip to the "genius" at the Apple store, (and really, I have had very good luck with the geniuses there!) I restored the photos, but needed to buy a new external drive. While I was there he was able to repair my hard drive on my imac. Then I had a problem getting the external drive powered with my firewire port. Trip to Radio Shack and everything is working....for now. But I only had the old drive for less than a year so it should be under warranty, the problem is I probably never sent in the warranty card. These things are a problem for me. And receipts are a true problem. What is the best way to deal with receipts? I once saw on a Martha Stewart show that there's a scanning device for all loose receipts. I just can never seem to find the important pieces of paper I need and that is the bottom line reason I want to get organized-I hate that feeling of stress when something is missing. I usually find the missing paper, card, or file, but not without spending way too many hours searching through piles of files. Right now in my bedroom there is a box of papers and as I clear other areas to make them presentable, that's where the papers go. My goal this week was to go through those boxes, but let me tell you that has been my goal for YEARS and it is so overwhelming. I did manage to go through and shred a few garbage bags worth of paper but I'll admit it's only a dent. Yesterday, my teenage son decided to go on a cleaning binge...rather unusual but after getting initially annoyed by this I decided to embrace it. He went around picking up random things and saying "should we throw this out?" so we got rid of a few broken pieces of electronic equipment and I ended up cleaning the kitchen. Today about all I did as far as organizing was put away laundry but I want to vacuum now and put the sheets back on the bed. Having everyone home makes the house dirtier but at least I have less school papers and I'm home to deal with it in small doses.