Should I upgrade to Leopard?

I am running a 1.33Ghz iBook G4 with 1GB of Ram, so my laptop is definitely up to the requirements.

I have a few concerns about upgrading, though.
- Apple says that Leopard requires 9.x GB of space. Is this on top of the space that Tiger takes up? I only have 10GB free on my 60GB hard drive. Of course, I don't have a need for any of the localization files and stuff.

- I really want a macbook, but A. I don't see it happening anytime in the near future and b. I don't really NEED it, since I'm not really doing anything that taxing right now. I'm basically doing student work and word processing. I did photography for a while that could have used a macbook, and I love it, but I decided that I would wait a couple of years since I have too much to do and spend money on right now to do/fund an expensive hobby like photography.
So I don't really need a new laptop, but if I ended up getting Leopard for my ibook, and then getting a macbook for say, Christmas or something, that would kind of suck since I just spent 129 bucks I didn't have to (or whatever it is with EDU pricing...)

The reason I want to upgrade is not really because of features, although the new UI and Finder etc. look extremely nice. What I'm most concerned about is losing support of my favorite freeware, etc. Do you know when developers start to require the next incremental release of OS X, because I am finding freeware day after day that I use.


So, is it worth it to upgrade to leopard, or would my money be better spent on something different, like a backup HD, as I'm always paranoid that one day my data is going to get flushed down the drain and I'm not serious enough about backing up. Leopard would be nice, but should I be worried about upgrading just yet?

 

i was thinking more of a hard drive to match the one in my ibook, and doing clone. I definitely don't have enough money for a larger drive (i guess I could settle for 5400 instead of 7200rpm though), AND leopard. That would be perfect though.
I would just backup stuff to DVD, but I don't have a superdrive, and for the price of an external drive, I'm already halfway towards a hard drive, and it's only 40 bucks for a good FW enclosure and stuff.

I guess I should go backup, then leopard.

Oh and I'm not planning on letting my ibook die any time soon, unless the Logic Board fries or something, but how common is that? I'm in high school so I guess it would be more realistic to expect a macbook by the time I'm ready to go to college than in teh near future. The ibook still has a good year or two of applecare on it, so I'm covered almost until then I guess (I'm a sophmore).

 

I figured on a FW or USB/FW enclosure from Other World Computing (probably the latter in case I want to transfer files to/from the family windows box that doesn't have firewire), and a barracuda, probably a 320, or maybe the next one down. Or I could buy a 160GB and Leopard, and that would probably work. But I figure Time Machine probably wants a large amount of disk space, but my internals only 60. So you don't think 7200RPM would be worth it?

The thing is, I wanted a bootable clone to boot from if my hard drive dies, since I might not be able to get a new one immediately, and I need to do my school work daily. Time Machine won't let me do that (right?), so I don't know what I'm going to do (I'll be using CCC or SuperDuper! until I can get Leopard). Would Time machine be a better option than a bootable backup (pros/cons?). Leopard's resizable partitions seem nice. That way I could use one drive for time machine, and the other for files that won't fit on my relatively small 60GB internal drive. Would time machine backup two volumes at once, or would I have to back that stuff up separately?

Thanks in advance for your time