How long should an external HDD last? The one I’m currently using for backing up my pictures has just died after a ridiculously short period of 4 months! I’m hopeful that not all the pics on it are lost, but it has sent me a large wakeup call.

I really need to sort out a better backup strategy as I’m starting to generate a large amount of data and my laptop’s 60Gb HDD just doesn’t cut it any more. So, anyone got any suggestions?

My current thoughts are to have an external USB HDD that I use for short term storage and then a large RAID based storage device at home. The home based device would either just be a USB/FW standalone device or NAS, but I’d ideally like it to have hot swap drive bays and probably potential for up to 2Tb total storage. Anyone have experience of such a device and care to offer reccomendations?