This is probably the best 80 bucks I have spent in computing. Now I don't have any excuse not to back up at least weekly. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in computing: those who have lost data, and those who will lose data. I was a member of the former set, and am making it harder to be a member of the latter set.
I bought a Seagate external 80-gig drive. It patches through the USB port. It's big and not very sexy, but it gets the job done. I got it for a buck a gig, which was a great price at the time. Witht he cost of storage coming down so fast, Seagate doesn't even make this drive any more, but I know that they do good work (despite their quality fall-off of several years ago, I think they're poised for more accuracy and dependability).
So I run a little freeware backup program once a week, backing up just data files (well, and mp3s, too). I had great plans to take it to work and do the same thing there, but I'm working on another solution there, involving their network and the way I do work. Since my computer is still at USB 1.1, the transfer rate isn't exactly optimal, but I can live with it.
The way I look at it, I think I bought myself at least one more year with this machine. I was worried about the Sony hard drive dying or corrupting, and now I don't have to worry about such a thing. Oh, it still might do it, but I won't lose anything inportant, just a bunch of reinstalls.
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