External hard drives and backup software

[girlyswot]

At the moment, my dissertation work is stored on the hard drive of the laptop and at Mozy. Completed sections are also held by my supervisor (and will be sent to the second supervisor as well). Notes and bibliographical information are at present only on my computer and at Mozy. I like Mozy a lot. It's free and automatic and has worked excellently when I've needed to retrieve things. If you don't currently do any backing up, I would definitely recommend it. But I'm not sure I want to put all my eggs into its basket, especially as the dissertation progresses.

Also, my laptop only has 50GB of space on the hard drive. Which is basically okay. I don't store lots of images, music or other large files on it. But it would be nice to clean it up a bit and move some of the things I really don't need easy access to out of the way.

So, I'm looking for a cheap, reliable, not necessarily vast in terms of space, external hard drive. And also for some good, reliable, cheap software which will do the automatic backing up of files.

Anyone?

ETA: Have now found this:

which looks like it might do the job (and is very pretty).

Comments

[amamama.livejournal.com]

We keep all our photos and music and important files on one of these: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=1&lang=en

It isn't big in physical terms, but it is big in terms of storage space! And it looks good. I'm sure the backup software the comes with it is reliable, but we managed to get something wrong - we backed up the whole hullabaloo, but nothing on Firefox or Thunderbird was available after we rebooted. No idea why, and haven't bothered to spend time trying to figure it out. I know I should... I should also set up automatic backup, but I haven't bothered to do that either. We just store everything directly on the Book. And it's easy to access from whichever PC we use, be it laptop or stationary.

[ramblingfancy.livejournal.com]

I just email stuff to my gmail account which seems to have an enormous memory tho admittedly nothing as important as a dissertation!

[moonette1.livejournal.com]

I really should look into backing up my novel and my husband's pictures (of which he just lost some from our winter trip to Yosemite). Right now I simply email my manuscript to myself. But what if Yahoo AND my computer implode at the same time??? :)

By the way - I desperately need a tutorial on how to insert images. And this one is an image AND a link at the same time! You're a magician.