Fair warning, this post is ridiculously off topic.
David - I'd suggest you save the money on a backup drive and try Carbonite online backup. I just signed up for it and have to say it is a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than running a backup routine every night (or when you remember) to a USB drive... (I've been doing that for ages too)
Inevitably, those backups stop running for some reason or another or don't keep a copy of the file I need, etc... On the other hand, Carbonite runs automatically and updates itself as files change without you ever tinkering with it.
Two things finally pushed me over the edge to go to a different solution than my external drives: 1) I had a growing collection of music on my computer that would be more and more painful to use, and 2) my family pictures and videos are now all digital and only stored on my hard drive. Even though I was backing them up to a second disk, a fire/theft, etc. would wipe me out completely. Yuck.
If you're interested, PM me your e-mail address (David or anyone else who wants to try it) as they have a referral program that lets me send you a coupon for 2 months free (as opposed to one-month free that you get by default). Fair disclosure, I get free months too if you sign up, but that's not why I'm recommending it. I just wish I would have done this a long time ago as it would have saved me a lot of money in external hard drives (I have about 2TB worth of them now).
For less than $5/month I could have accomplished the same thing with Carbonite... Oh, and did I mention they offer unlimited backup for this price? Pretty amazing.
Jason
Two caveats:
1) The initial backup is slow... I had about 100GB that I marked for backup initially and it took 15 days to upload - I imagine they purposely limit bandwidth to help keep their costs in line. Once that was done though, it now updates in only a minute or two each day.
2) It only backs up internal hard drives - not USB drives - another way they control their exposure on unlimited backups. If you happen to have eSata external drives, I've found it will back those up. Having said that, they don't limit how many internal drives you can back up. I have 4, and while I don't have them all full, it let me pick and choose from any of them.
