WTH? Get thee to Best Buy, spend $130 for that 3 TB Toshiba external HDD, and get Time Machine or Carbon Clone Copy working. Later when you spend the $500 for the Time Capsule, the External HDD can be the "store in barn in case house burns down" backup.

I am super paranoid with personal as well as business backups. I home I backup to my NAS (mirrored drives) nightly as well as to external, offsite hard drives monthly. I also use a cloud service called CrashPlan for the most valued files - nearly 1.5TB thus far - but that's not feasible for all my data given my internet pipe. Certain stuff is also on Dropbox.

At my work, I have onsite RAID disks and offsite tapes (LTO & DLT) with Microsoft DPM and BackupExec, plus Dropbox and CrashPlan in the cloud for the most vital stuff. We are an enterprise software company and therefore any significant data loss would be catastrophic.

BTW - I have had numerous internal and external hard drives fail. When you have a lot of them failure becomes a regular, almost predictable occurrence. I've had computers stolen as well, and also destroyed accidentally. Never, ever, entrust all of your stuff solely to a single disc drive, or keep your main and backup media in the same location.

Be mindful of backup mirrored drives. Check them weekly to ensure they are healthy.

I lost 4 years of non critical data at my office recently.

Data was stored on server with mirrored backup drive. Mirror died within a year of install and I never knew it. When the other drive we were writing to finally died, I discovered the issue.

Live and learn. Now we back up to the cloud as well as the usual in house methods.

THere's no excuse for this anymore. I bought a 1.5TB drive from Costco. It syncs my document folder automatically and runs a backup once per week. I never have to look at it unless I accidentally delete something.

I'm going to see if I can find this later today. Good advice! Been putting this off too long!

This. My wife has TBs upon TBs of photos and video. Copies kept and home and safety deposit box. Pain in the butt sometimes but necessary. FWIW my Office Depot frequently enough has closeout external drives sitting up front on the closeout table. Snagged a couple of WD 2TB drives last month for around $70 each. I'll eventually need them.

On top of that, we just bought my daughter a laptop for Christmas. After umpteen Dells via work for my wife and I this Dell is dead two days after Christmas. Won't post. Tech installed new motherboard on Friday. Still no luck. It's in a box to Dell as I type. My long winded way of saying any one of them can go at anytime. Keep your stuff backed up.

-J

PCs backup automatically to Network Drive. The business part of the Network drive backs up daily to another network drive at my house, with a more extensive backup every weekend.

I've already had two SSD failures, and the backups saved my butt!

Re the resolution to backup:
An I.T. friend of mine has a sign in his office
Jesus Saves and so should you.

timely thread, my Maxtor back-up drive just died. won't even turn on. going to local Micro Center today. I don't think the Toshiba is Mac compatible.

I used to use Carbonite, I've switched over to CrashPlan and all of our household computers are on it. In addition I run time machine on my primary computer plus a full image backup before every business trip.