Quote Originally Posted by Tone2TheBone
Funny you should mention this because I recently lost tons of data on an external hard drive that also went south on me too...and like you, I am going back to saving on DVDs. Maybe others can learn from the info on this thread!
What I do is use several HD's. Storage is cheap these days.

I have one drive just for the OS, which I back up to another HD.
I have one HD just for music-making files, which I back up to a fourth HD.
I have one HD just for all my documents, which I back up to a sixth HD.
I have a few other external drives for movies and music, which are also duplicated in the aforementioned drives for storaging. I also have 2 iPods where I keep music, 200G in total.

To add to that, I have 5 terabytes of online storage space for TV programs, plus two 50-gigabyte online storages for www and for posting/online storage of music and data. Plus at work I have basically unlimited backup space for my laptop backups, plus a few network locations plus two online data banks which can be accessed with any machine plus cell phones. Plus of course a couple of HD TV recorders for other TV's in the house.

In addition we have two laptops, which also house duplicates of almost all music. Some of the music is also duplicated to an external drive for Xbox 360.

No way I could save to DVD's...they're only 4,7G and just my music collection is like 200-300 gigabytes. I'm not actually sure but I'm guessing I have something like 3 terabytes of drives for my PC plus laptops.

So what I suggest is just buy a couple of, say 1-3-gigabyte external drives and set up your machine so it copies stuff around daily and you'll have all your data safe in at least 3 places. Better yet, make one of those a RAID NAS drive and hook it up to your WLAN and have wireless access to all data from anywhere, and even yet double-secured.

These days stuff like them HD's is cheap as bread so no reason to play with DVD's or such no more.

And, I also try and change/upgrade my HD's every few years both to get more space there and to get rid of them before their 3-year warranties end.