John, where are you buying your DVDs? Or your external drives? Either I am buying hardware in the wrong place or you're paying too much for DVDs. I bought 100 DVD+Rs for $35 on sale at Office Depot a few months back, and I've seen them pretty close to that price at Fry's since then. That would be about $2.50 for seven DVDs--a fabulous price for an external hard drive!

I made a full backup to CDs a few months ago, and I have backups now on this external drive. I will make another backup (probably to DVD) again later just to have that redundancy. The external drives are best when sitting in one place and not jostled around. They, like any hard drive, can fail, so aren't the perfect answer.

Last week I saw a name-brand 300 gig external drive on sale at Fry's online store (Outpost.com) for $150 after a $50 rebate.

SRS