Back up your data (photos, videos) TONIGHT!

[David Wolfson]

In terms of cost, compatibility, convenience, and durability I think external USB magnetic drives clearly have headed the pack and will for years to come. Any flexible magnetic or magneto-optical media has always had the problem of most failures being catastrophic. USB solid state memory is getting pretty good, but still depends on electronics that are entirely internal to the device -- if it fails it's dead for sure. Solid state memory block data transfer rates also still lag behind HDDs.

Mirror contents and rotate drives between an offsite store like a safe-deposit box and home/office. Do the same using and verifying a full compressing image backup program such as Acronis for the contents of the computer HDD with very regular incremental backups to the on-site drive. File mirroring of only new and changed files between drives can be done pretty quickly while using the computer for other things.

 

[Jason Boggs]

If anybody is interested, Best Buy has an 8 gig USB drive on sale for 35 bucks. I picked up two yesterday. Not a bad deal IMO.

 

[Jason Foster]

Of course at some point, it gets to be too much. Sometime you just have to accept a loss. But not to take away from the advice. I'm not sure if I'd go throwing HDs at friend's houses...but that's me. I think a simple firebox able to hold the HD is good enough.