I'm not quite sure what you are asking. Did you sign up for shops and you don't know what you signed up for? Check your email because many/most of them have probably sent you an acknowledgement about the job. Are you not sure what companies you have signed up for? Again, check your email because most of your companies will have sent you an acknowledgment of your registration and/or an acceptance of you as a shopper, complete with your logon and password. If you have saved a list of the companies you are signed up for with your passwords, just go to their sites, log on and check the job boards.
As for the external hard drives, I just bought a 1 TB external hard drive on buy.com a week or so ago for $94 that has a $25 rebate so will end up costing $69. The prices are coming down fast and even the local office supply places are getting cheaper on them. If you aren't using it on a laptop and need the portability, there is little reason to pay extra for a smaller footprint drive. They all seem to be USB versions these days, standardly 7200 RPM and are recognized readily by the machine. To give you an idea about space use. The drive I bought was for my sisters. One had totally clogged her laptop with about 22,000 photographs, mostly from a 10 megapixel camera. Those we moved to the external drive and backed up her machine. We then backed up her desktop machine. My other sister had her laptop over and after cleaning trash off of it, it too was backed up to the external drive. With the three machines backed up to the external drive we had only used about 3/10 of the capacity of the drive. So realize you can certainly get a drive significantly smaller than a 1 TB and it will be adequate for your use.
Depending on the nature of your 'crash', you may be able to use the 'Restore' feature of Windows to get the computer back to its pre-crash state if the hard drive itself did not die. Restore is available in the Control Panel of Windows and you have the machine revert to its settings a day or more before the crash. In this procedure it is the registry of the machine that is being restored and your data files should be as you left them.
