and I badly need a new back-up, money is tight so I'll be interested in replies

I've been using a 500 Gig Western Digital HD for nearly 2 years. No problems, whatsoever.

*The one I bought is still available on Amazon. Mixed reviews, but that's the nature of the beast. There's also a 1TB Seagate with mostly satisfied users.

is reporting probs, I can still get data off it but can't write to it which is a shame as there's over 100G available

a Maxtor 1TB hard drive to store all my music - had it for about a year with no problems so far.

is OK

For a simple solution then theres not much of a difference between Seagate and WD for external drives. LaCie drives are good and often add different interfaces, but tend to be a little more expensive and as they do not manufacture the internal hard drives themselves, tend to use those from Seagate / WD etc etc. If you are on a Mac its worth paying a little extra to get one with a FW interface (FW800 is great if you have a newer Mac) - I find that FW gives a better sustained transfer speed than USB2. Also go with more storage space than you will need - if you are looking at 1TB then get 1.5TB / 2TB. Its surprising how fast you fill it up (especially if storing video).

The main problem with external drives is that whilst they tend to be a little better in terms of reliability (as they are not in constant use) they are still disk drives and can still fail and lose all your data. Whilst reliability is pretty good these days and the manufacturers give a 5 year warranty, thats little consolation if its your data that goes down the pan....

Personally I use a Drobo (www.drobo.com). This is basically an external box that standard 3.5in drives can be slotted into and configured as a RAID 5 array. The beauty of it is that (a) the data is protected - if one drive fails, you just swap it out and (b) its expandable - when you run out of space, you can swap the drives for newer / larger ones without losing or having to transfer your data (as long as you do one at a time). It holds up to 4 drives so you can start with 2 and expand as needed etc etc. You can even mix different drives / capacities. I have mine set up with 4 x 1.5TB drives which gives me 4.5TB of usable space.

I've just been investigating external drives for my Mac and I was pleased to discover that you can now put together a 650G 2.5 inch firewire drive. Why is this a good thing? Simple, noise. No external supply, no fans no drive whizzing faster than you need it to. There are downsides, you can't get a terrabyte one and they cost a bit more per gig but it's nice to have the choice. I'm actually planning to use mine to permanently expand the capacity of my Mac Mini because I just noticed that it only has 1.5G free!!!

Always remember that there's a difference between a backup and an archive. Generally you don't need such a big drive for a backup (which I would count as keeping your constantly changing data) and an archive (for things like a music, video, photographs).

Having said all that, if you use a laptop (or laptops) I think the best solution is a NAS drive sitting in a cupboard somewhere because it's effectively always connected to your PC which is a major incentive to backing up - remember a backup drive is only really a backup drive if you actually get round to using it!

I just thought of one more thing that I'd be interested in someone shouting me down about the foolishness of the notion but I always make sure that I do as much of my backup as possible on a FAT32 formatted drive. I know that there are practical as well as technical limitations in doing this but if my Mac or Windows PC died and I need files I want to be able to plug my backup into any PC available (OSX, Windows or Linux) which would be a problem if I had an HF+ or NTFS formatted backup drive. I only use native formatting if I think I'm going to need to store files over 2G.

I've backed up my music (around 11,000 tracks) with external hard drives three times. And three times the hard drives have become corrupt.
I have a feeling it may be a problem with my very old, and very slow, PC. I had to restore to factory settings about a year ago and it has become painfully slow and laboured since.
I keep two iPods up-to-date, so I'm hoping they act as a back up, particularly as my PC is close to death!

All hard drives die eventually, usually when you need them most. Anything you really care about (especially photos) should get burned onto DVD as well as whichever kind of backup drive you go for.

Has anyone taken the plunge and dared to back things up online and started working cloudwise? Being a pitiful Windows bod and having sufered at the claws of nefarious viruses a couple of times, I'm getting tempted.

Why nothing! What could possibly go wrong?

All my photo's are on CD's and I shall be hoping Santa will help me invest in something large and external. My old PC went 'Phut' a couple of years ago and it was a nightmare.

You possibly heard the swearing.