I also have to agree and vouch for a back-up hard drive. With prices of external hard drives being so cheap these days, anyone who doesn't have a back-up drive these days would likely want to shoot themselves if they ever had a major crash without backups.
$100 - $150 range gives you LOTS of External Memory and various case options these days.
I don't know about everyone else, but I probably have enough time spent on documents and info on my computer worth many thousands of dollars to me. I am sure many people have more info on their drives than me. (value is a relative thing - But, I have spent THOUSANDS of man hours creating my documents. And I know my time is worth more than a $1.00 per hour...... most of the time anyway <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" /> )
I bought a 100gig laptop hard drive for about $100 a couple of years ago and purchased a mini-case to stick it in to use for a back-up. Currently, that is PLENTY of hard-drive for most of my current documents. My most worthy/valuable documents are still just a bunch of Word docs that all combined would only be a few megs. But, I am in the process of re-ripping thousands of songs of my many hundreds of CD's into FLAC. Flac compresses to about half the original CD info rate with no loss of Data quality. But, these are still pretty large music files. - Usually, about 20-45 megs compared to typical 128kps rip files only being about 3-6 megs. About 4,000 songs will add up to about 128 gigs or so. So, I will have to upgrade my back-up once getting near done ripping files. I am ripping with Exact Audio Copy (EAC). This process takes about 3 - 8 minutes per song. So, I will have a LOT of time dropped into these files and $100 - $150 for backing up these files alone will be an EASY justification.
I already purchased a 2nd internal hard-drive that I installed in my desktop dedicated for these files. My wifes computer also has about 750 gigs of hard-drive. She works for an out-sourced IT company and won a high end Dell about 5-6 months ago. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" /> So, I will back-up some stuff on her computer and conversely, I back-up some of her stuff on mine. Still, I will probably be purchasing a 320 - 500 gig external to back-up more stuff once I get these rips closer to done and I get my finances back up to reasonable .... and caught up on my knife list. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />
Our two computers might have to "DO" for a while. But, External Back-Up drives are much less prone to crashing than computer systems on the internet and running various programs day in and out. So, I recommend External back-up drives. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />
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Like Tyger75 said, you can purchase Mini-sized (2.5") back-up drives (250 - 320 gigs) for $100 - $150.
The Mini-sized drives are awesome because they are actually a LOT smaller than the 3.5" drives. 2.5" - 3.5" doesn't sound like much, but disc size of the memory discs doesn't equate at the same ratio as the over-all size of the full set of drives with case. But, a 250-320Gig 2.5" encased drive is probably about 1/4th the size of a 250-500gig 3.5" drive. A 2.5" External drive in case is about 5" x 3" x 0.5" or so.
I have a drawer safe and my little 2.5" drive in it for protection. A fire protection safe would be better.
If you have a nice roomy gun safe or similar and size isn't an issue and/or you just need more memory for the buck, the 3.5" drives with about 500gigs of memory can be readily found for around $100!
I (also) highly recommend a good external back-up drive. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />
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