You might also try a Zip drive. Some of them plug into the printer port on the computer and go up to 100 meg disks. The later ones have 250 or 750 meg floppies.
If you just want the data off of the drive, pull the drive out of the computer, plug it into another computer as a "slave" drive (D) drive and copy the info that way. Do this with a desktop computer then either network the desktop to the laptop, or copy to a CD, USB or other drive then to the laptop. Personally I network my laptop to my desktop.
Everytime I return home from a flight I back up the laptop on the desktop, then backup both onto a 160 gig external USB drive that is connected to the desktop. That way all three would have to go down before I lose major data.