About 2 years ago, my company handed me an external hard drive to hook up to my computer at work. Obviously, the purpose was to back up information, some of which is only possessed by me. I felt pretty secure with that external drive humming away on my desk.

Well, that is, I did feel good about it until about three months ago when the thing broke. IT did what they could to save it, and retrieved a lot of the files and put them on a network hard drive. Then, about three weeks ago, they changed over our computers, and my copies on my HD were lost. That's OK, they're on the shared drive. Unfortunately, of the 34 files I needed, 14 were corrupted and unusable. I'm just glad I had backed everything onto CD.

The point of my story? Don't trust any one method with your backups. The more backups you have, the better your chances of recovering from a catastrophic failure.

Tom