R.I.P. my external Maxtor harddrive

Goodbay, my friend.. It’s not the end.. for me, but for all my backups and personal data it is. I considered myself protected doing a regular backup and moving all goodies stuff on regular basis to an external harddrive. How stupid of me.

The thing is, that I am still struggling having european plugs in UK. This caused me to use my laptop cable to power up my external harddrive. I just assumed that if the plugs are the same shape and color and converters looks the same, then output is the same as well. Do not follow my example.

Anyway, now I need to find a better solution. So far next possibilites are considered:

• buy new external harddrives, this time double the amount needed, so I could have weekly backup on first one and monthly on second. This option will require me to have at least 2 drives (250 GB each could cost about 110 pounds x 2 = 220 GBP and more). More manual actions required from me.

• Setup a file server. This is a way to go in the long perspective, currently it could be difficult  cause I want it to be located in Estonia, but I live in UK for half a year already. However it has more advantages, as being always online and available, having mirrored drives to ensure failure-safe. Still some backup of backup should be done to ensure in case of loosing server some data is preserved. This is a costly solution, than will require double amount of harddrives (not external though) and a file server itself. Plus most probably good internet uplink. So, about 400 GBP one time investment and monthly internet connection bill.

• Good old CD/DVD backuping. Boring.. Good only if You have DVD-R/RW.
  For example my photos are taking 1.5 GB, so backing up to CD is the pain in the ass. The cheapest solution though.

• Send zipped files to my gmail account. Takes huge time to upload. Also it is not secure. With all my respect, I do not trust Google my personal and especial work files. Could user encrypted virtual drive though…

All suggestions are welcome. Good practice and success stories too. Please note that now You need to register prior making a comment. Sorrt about that but I was receiving too much spam comments and was too lazy to write antispam plugin.