Apparently many people are having trouble with hard drives, or else others are recommending to come to this site for help. Either way, I have some thoughts I wish to share with others.
The best and most practical way to make a complete reliable backup of all your material is to just have another hard drive expressly for that purpose. In fact, the hard drive can be made a clone of the original drive. To that end, it is not necessary to buy a new hard drive that is very much larger than the original. Your original drive probably has enough space. A hard drive that contains a complete copy of everything is the best way for most users.
My best recommendation is to buy a new hard drive very similar to the one you already have, perhaps slightly larger, but the same technology and other specifications.
This is more than just my personal opinion. Although there have been many improvements in hard drive technology in the past two years, there also have been some stumbling blocks along the way. Hard drives below 500 GB are based on earlier technology has proven to be very reliable. reliable failure data varies somewhat according to who is examining the data. Statistically some of the more sophisticated drives been manufactured recently are having higher than average failure rates. So with that information one can easily see it is not wise to invest money into technologies that are very close to the cutting edge when you want something to be reliable as a backup medium.
Again, the best advice is to get a backup method in place before you start making any changes to your system. Do the backup first, make sure the back it really does work the way you intended it to, and then start changing things as you wish.
