Recommend External Hard Drive...

If you are willing to buy a sepate enclosure and drive, you can get 1.5TB for less than $150.

Yesterday, I purchased an AcomData Samba enclosure ($39.99 at Costco, includes shipping) and a Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB ($89.99 at Newegg, no shipping, regular price is $20 more, might just be a 1-day, or Thanksgiving deal).

See recent discussion in this forum of Wstern Digital Caviar Green.

hmm...I will give it a look. Thanks.

I forgot to mention that the $39.99 for the enclosure fro Cosco not only includes the shipping, but it also includes Costco's return policy. And, if you are not a Costco member, you can buy the crittr online for a 5% upcharge. Not sure what return policy is for non-members.

All right, thanks. I cannot tell you how important it is to have a backup drive just for storage. That's why I"m taking my time.

+1 for buying an enclosure and a HDD yourself. Also, I recommend you get an eSATA enclosure if possible to allow for faster back ups. If your motherboard doesn't have an eSATA port you can buy a PCi eSATA for ~$20-25.

One needs at least 2 external drives, never having all connected at the same time.

kalikow, are you referring to RAID? That's actually a good idea.

No.

If you have all your USB druves concurrently connected, a power glitch could ruin all the backups.

Fo my Vista system, I have 2 USB drives, only 1 of which is connected at any point.

On a windows 2000 system, I have two 80GB drives that alternate on a single USB conecttion, and a 160GB USB drive that is always conneted. Used to also have a 200GB drive that was always connected, but that drive died.

I am temporarily adding a 1.5TB drive to the Windows system to do some testing of a backup program.
The 80GB drives are not large enough to have archives from two backup programs.

I only do image backups.

On the Windows 2000 system, on the 80GB drives, I do incremental baclups. On the 160GB drive, I only do differnmtial backups.

On the Vista system I do differential backups.

For important things such as programming projects, financial/health stuff, and certain Excel spreadsheets, I copy to either a ZIP disk or a CD-RW.

Yes, I know, I do it too. I put files not only on my corsair flash drive but also on cd/mostly dvds, but still want an external hard drive. Western Digital had Elements for $70 (320 GB) at Fryz. We'll see. I"m not in a rush and will take my time. I'm not too worried about Brand and eventually no matter what you do, there is possibility that the drive will fail.

Yes, I do burn important data on dvds; some generic stuff can be put online, yes.

What's it for ? If for backup, this product stands alone:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-backup-recovery...

If ya just want a bare disk, I love the flexibility the BlacX provides, only $34 and easy to swap drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Yes, backup only. I will check out, thanks.

See my other thread on the WD Caviar Green.

WD told me that the Black is overkill for an extermal drive.
Green is more appropriate.

Thank you for all of your feedback / comments.

Hai!
I have also bought myself a Lacie disk but along with that I have also got myself a Lacie disk recovery software and therefore I have nothing to worry.