Periodic backup HDD

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My question is should I go with internal or external on this, I'm looking at getting maybe a 1TB drive and can't decide what to go with. I want to do bi-weekly backups of my system, since I've never actually backed up my system at all. I know this is risky and that's why I want to start looking into it ASAP.

 

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Personally, I back up my file server at home every night to USB disk and do an incremental backup hourly throughout the day to a secondary internal drive. The server's RAID5 as well, so I could even stand to lose a drive in it before needing to resort to a backup. My SAN is backed up by scheduled snapshots every four hours, my VMs are backed up using ESX Ranger nightly and I run robocopy scripts to back up my media files to two separate USB disks every day. My wife's workstation is a VM, so I don't need to bother imaging her PC any more, but I do image my own workstation once a month - just to make restore times quicker in case of a hard disk failure. pretty much everything else I've got is on ESX, so I don't have to bother with a monolithic backup solution for any of my infrastructure.

I've learned - from painful experience - that being without a backup gives you an absolutely horrible sinking feeling in your stomach when disaster strikes. I had to rip nearly 600 CDs to .mp3 again after losing a single 250Gb disk that had no backups a few years back. I'm never going to be in that situation again!

External drives are so cheap nowadays that I would personally go for two of those - they're portable, USB2 transfer speeds are fast and as cheap as they are you may as well get a couple of them and run a backup job to each for added redundancy.

 

Another vote for USB backup techniques.

Personally, I have a 16GB flash/pen drive that I back up my documents every week or so.

Qs

 

Thanks Zeb and Qs for the advice.

Zeb that seems like a super duper uber turbo overkill for my needs, mostly I'm just trying to backup the small amount of mp3s, and documents I've created for college. I've been looking into the USB2.0 backup solution and think I might spring for this Fandom drive. It seem like a pretty decent deal, maybe I could talk the wife into letting me have one for my B-day in a couple of months.

 

The good thing about an external solution is that it can be disconnected in the event a disaster occurs... direct lightning strike, fire, etc. That, plus the danger of virus infection is why I didn't go with an internal mirrored solution.