Your harddrive is going to die and you will lose everything!

Hard drives will statistically die either within the first 2 weeks of it's life or 4-5 years after its initialization.  The advent of the external drive happened roughly 5 years ago so you know what that means, that many people will be experiencing hard drive failures exponentially over the next couple of years.  I've got to admit that I was one of them and this is what I've learned from the tragedy.

Your images are worth a whole lot more than the cost of a 2 - 1tb hard drives (roughly $400 and lowering), so why are you not adequately protecting them.   You may think its a great idea to use one of these new "Big drives" that are coming out.  Well there's actually 2 hard drives that are spanned together and if one fails than the whole drive fails.  There is actually a mathematical equation for this, showing that the more drives you add to a raid your chances of failure will double each drive.  This means, these Lacie Big Drives have a 50% larger chance of failing and taking all your precious photographs with them.  Which brings me to rule #1.

1. Don't use drives that use Raid 0 (aka spanned).  

2.  Do use drives that are Raid 1 (aka Mirrored Raid) 

Setting up mirrored raid costs twice what you would normally spend, but what you need to ask yourself is "if this drive were to fail, would i be willing to pay between $1000 and $4000 to retrieve this data"?  If the answer is yes, than you need a mirrored raid system, because even if your willing to pay that sort of money to retrieve your data, it doesn't actually mean that it will be retrieved.  

3.  Plan for the 3 types of drive destruction.  Hard Drive Failure, Electrical damage (like a huge power surge) and physical damage (like a fire).

If you mirror your drives than you are protected against hard drive failure, but what if somebody plugs the wrong power cord into your hard drive.  Then in one surge, both drives get fried because they're both connected to each other.

The way to solve this is to have a 3rd drive with a copy of that data in a separate enclosure.  Then to protect from fire, take the drive home or to another location, separate from the location of the primary drive.  Some people prefer to use DVD's.  Sometimes this may be a little impractical and DVD's fail as well.

The idea is have your data in 3 places and prepare for the failure.  If your like me, than this is life work and deserves to be protected.

Some great backup resources

General Drive info

4 drive hot swappable mirror work flow idea

A great place to buy drives and enclosures