a smart user will get two, yes 2, external hard drives
@ProblemAgain: Your strategy will work but IMHO it's less hassle to just pick up a NAS that supports RAID 1. Â Netgear has one with 8TB total storage for $199 but there are a ton to choose from on the market.
For the non-geeks that don't care to google, a device that supports Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) has multiple hard-drives that function as one logical drive. Â Specifically with RAID 1 the data is mirrored between disks so that there are physically two copies in case one disk gives up the ghost. Â Plug the Network-attached Storage (NAS) device into your network...some have wireless capability...and then set it up so that your computer backs up its data to it regularly. Â You can pretty much put it on a bookshelf and forget about it. 4951