Learning from Voldemort

Why not simply invest in a RAID 1 system? For teh cost of all those backup drives and the time spent managing your backups, you could get a decent RAID card and mirrored drives, which will make backups a thing of the past. I bought a Dell XPS 700 a year ago with a 350GB RAID 1 system, and I stopped worrying about DVD backups, drive images and hard drive crashes. If you're particularly paranoid, you can still do the occasional drive image to in the extremely rare case of catastrophic data corruption.

And you can now get 64GB solid state drives for your laptop (albeit at an inflated price). I predict, in a year or two as the prices come down, mechanical HDs will be a thing of the past.

I am not an expert in these matters, i just made sure that my new machine had a RAID 1 setup. I'd have to do more research if I had to convert an existing machine. Wikipedia has a good primer on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID).

I do know that you need a RAID 1 card and two identical hard drives. Although not recommended for single drive setups, I have only one partition on each mirrored drive, which makes recovery much simpler. Best to start with two brand new drives for a RAID 1 system than to add a hard drive after the fact, because the dives will need to be formatted anyways to create the RAID system. If you're concerned about read/write performance with two drives running as opposed to only one, you can get a RAID 1 system with a third solid state drive as a read/write cache, though unless you're doing some serious data crunching like mass video rendering or 3D modelling, you don't need it.

Hope that helps.