Ok - I finally got an USB cord that seems to work so I'm getting ready to flash.
Any advice on the best method to back up to a and be able to restore 4Gb flash card?
I really do not want to lose my precious for very long.
I'd like a "clone" for an easy restore.
tia

Do I understand correctly:

You want to clone your OS onto the SD card. (Is the card blank, or has it got valuable data to restore onto the FAT partition?)
Then reflash main memory with new OS.
Then copy files back across manually to restore stuff?

Assuming the card is empty, I'd suggest PBs deb as the easiest method. Geraldko's scripts and stuff were easily adaptable, which made it easy for me to do a mega-custom quad-boot. But the deb is easy and all-in-one, unless you need a different layout.
When you reflash, you either need to use the Linux flasher, or you'll have to (manually) reinstall bootmenu after the reflash. The Windows flasher reflashes the whole device, but the Linux flasher lets you only reflash the rootfs and kernel. Of course, if you're going OS2007->OS2008, I think you need a new initfs anyhow, so you'll still have to reinstall the bootmenu.

If you need to save data off the card, and you have a big enough card in the other slot (internal flash), tar it up onto the other card, and untar it back when you're done. Or you can certainly pull it off onto the PC over USB, and put it back; I only have USB 1.1 on the machine I was working on, so I wouldn't have done that, except my second card (a real card, I'm N800) is too small... with USB 2.0, it shouldn't be too bad, but it's still probably fastest to go card->card.