?? USB Memory Sticks, or SD Cards ??

[skategoat]

For $99 a year I think I'll just buy an external hard drive thats 3-4 times the size of my lap top.

I'm sure you have good intentions but what happens if:

- your house is broken into and the thief takes both your computer and your external drive.

- you have a fire or flood or other natural disaster and your external hard drive is wiped out.

- you overwrite an important file but don't realize it until after the backup event occurs and you cannot go back to your old file.

Off site storage, whether it is in the form of disks, optical media or an online service makes a lot of sense for those reasons. But then again, it all depends on how you value your data.

[bobdea]

nou! f4gg37! i r 1337 u $tupid fr00b

Sidenote, you wanna know when you're REALLY a geek? When at first glance, $tupid looks like you mean a string, called tupid. Jesus..

sh!7 U 1337 sk!llz r t0tally 'splo!tz

[Derf]

Whatever you choose, do your backups. I just spent a day recovering data from my brother's failed hard drive. Of course, he had no backups and he doesn't know a boot sector from a kick in the ass . Which, by the way, is exactly what I gave him after he told me he had 4 years of photos on the drive and not a single backup.

Floss your teeth. Backup your hard drive.

Backups are VERY important. I once lost 30 GB of data: several years of school work, pictures, music (some rare). Now I have a file server for backups with 2x 160 GB drives in RAID 1 running Linux. As for offsite, I will setup a backup service, probably using rsync, with my father's backup server which very similar, except it's 2x 80 GB. Both servers were cheap to make as I just had to buy some new discs and put them is some used Pentium 2 computers.

As for large files exceeding the 4 GB file size limitation of FAT32, there is uncompressed video and DVD images that come to mind.