Portable External HDD suggestions?

[mrat93]

I am a student who will begin college this September. It would be nice to not have to worry about backing up my data for the next four years, but unfortunately, hard drives are never reliable.

I'm replacing the stock MBP hard drive with a 1TB Western Digital drive with a 3-year warranty. I came across this external drive, but I have never heard anything about the brand. Does anybody have experience with this company's products (or, more specifically, this hard drive?) It has a 7-year warranty, but I don't want to have to go through multiple replacements in a few years.

Does anybody have any other suggestions that have at least a 4-year warranty?

 

[McGiord]

The fact that they offer that lengthy warranty doesn't necessarily means that the unit will last for that long, certain brands just use that gimmick to gain customers, and then have good service to repair.
That brand was very good with old floppy disks, I am not sure about hard disk drives.

Always use Amazon as a good review reference from other actual owners:
http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Acclaim-Portable-External-97393/dp/B003WOWBEE

I always buy from OWC:
www.macsales.com

For backups it is always good to have:
1- A clone of the internal hard drive (that you can swap)
2- Time Machine Backup
3- Another external drive to store another backup of important files and an image of the clone (#1).

There are another factors like: portability, power input, and connection type USB, eSATA, Firewire, Thunderbolt, etc.
USB 2.0 is kind of slow for frequent backups.