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Hard drives
You should probably be ok as long as you stick to one of the big guys, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital. There are a bunch of external hd's out there that come complete with relatively good backup software and one of them has a one touch button that will do the backup for you, after you have to set it up probably. You can do it yourself sometimes cheaper if you get a drive on sale (like 49.99 for a 100-120 etc) at compusa or best buy and then buy your own enclosure. Either way, get one that has a fan. THese new hd's run teribbly hot and overheating is a big cause of failure. I have a 250 gig and it gets so hot it almost burns you. I leave the cover off of my enclosure and don't run it all the time.
I've been in IT for about 15 years now, and I have seen lots of different manufacturers in the desktops, and servers I have worked on and for me anyway, they all seem to fail at the same rate. Not many really, but you get a handful of each brand over time. None has really stood out above the others for me anyway on failure rate. Newer drives also have this SMART technology where the computer will tell you the drive is starting to fail. That has saved us a bunch of times. It sometimes gives you the ability to get everything off before you replace it. I don't know if an external setup will give you that though, since it would be usb and on bootup may not be noticed by the system.
For backup I use nero backitup, (got it free with my dvd burner but you can buy it too) and it does a great job of doing full,incremental etc. It has a scheduler and just does it's thing. Some hd's come with backup software free, so it may be good to compare who includes what.
Good luck,
Eric
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