Yeah I was thinking of getting a huge external hard drive, connecting it to backup all my data, and then disconnecting it and keeping it someplace safe until I want to modify it. So is an external drive basically a regular EIDE hard drive but in a special enclosure that connects through USB? It seems like it's cheaper to buy the HD and enclosure separately...

> > Hmm those don't look too expensive. But are they any more reliable than
> regular
> > hard drives? What about tape backups? Does anyone use those anymore?
> >
>
> External harddrives are fast, reliable, portable and convenient. They are just
> as reliable as your regular hardrive as long as you're not throwing them around
> or dropping them. Chances are next to nill that both your data (regular HDD) and
> your backup (external HDD) will die at exactly the same time. A HDD can save
> several backups and be erased and re-written time and again.
>
> CD's / DVD's are error prone, unreliable (media/drive quality dependant) and
> still quite limited in capacity (in comparison to a harddrive). You have to
> store them under very specific conditions to get even a few years life from
> them. If you have more than 1 disk of data to backup then spanning over several
> disks can be a pain - same with restoring data from a spanned backup -
> especially if you just need to extract 1 file. If you use inexpensive -r's then
> you need to use new disks for each backup adding to the landfill.
>