Back-Up Hard Drive
 

I have all my music on an external HD and I keep back-up copies on DVD-R's. So my question is that the best way to back up my HD or is there a better way to do it. Ho many back-up of back-ups do you have are you super paranoid that you keep back-ups in bunkers across the world LOL. I've neer had a problem with the HD but I know they can just die randomly sometimes.

I'm about as careful as anyone on these boards, and my routine is not overly complicated:

Original data is stored on tower's hard drive.
Backup data is ghosted (via Norton Ghost) on an external hard drive. This hard drive is then stored in a locked fire-resistant file cabinet at work most of the time (where we keep our student files), which is 20+ miles away from my home.

In addition, every once in a while, I copy outlook and access databases, documents, and media files to the work server, which is very secure - automatically backed up in 3 buildings across town. This protects me, at least to a small degree, if something bad happens when I've brought the external home to do a backup.

I'm a bit more paranoid than most.

As I have multiple systems at home that I use for various tasks, I need access to all my media/documents etc. from each system, so I have a file server that stores everything. That does an automated backup to another internal drive each night. Once a week I backup the more important files to an external drive, I also keep DVD/flash media copies of files I could never replace at another site.

At work I look after about 400 desktop systems and 200 laptops and the number of failed hard drives I see is scary...