Few enough people have backups and comprehensive virus protection *before* their first destroy-all-your-data crash. The ones who do, it could be argued, are owed the right to be smug about it in exchange for the rest of us not having to feel like morons over it. All part of the social contract.

I bought a Seagate Free Agent Pro 750GB for my Mac at Costco for under $200. It comes with both USB and Firewire (much faster). I keep all of my iTunes (350+GB) on it and really like how it turns off automatically when I put the computer to sleep and turns on when the computer awakens. They also now have a 1TB model. They come with a 5-year warranty.

Otherworld Computing (http://www.otherworldcomputing.com/) has a nice selection of Firewire/USB drives. I just got the 1TB Mercury Elite Pro and have a Neptune and another smaller portable one for the laptop. Their prices are not out of line. The drives cases are well built and they have a large selection.

Drobo

I don’t have one, but it’s the way I am going when I get a new machine. I’ve currently got two (2) 250Gb LaCie drives working, one that I use as Network Attached and one that I keep in a safe place and attach directly to the machine for a once weekly backup.

Check out the LaCie 2Big Network hard drive. We have multiple macs in the house and instead of having to back up files to it on each, we do it over the network to the drive. I also got one for my office as a file server. The setup was pretty easy (better than some of the other network drives I’ve tried). It also has the option of running as a RAID 0 mode (where instead of 1TB of storage you have 500GB of storage but its mirrored on two drives, so in case one of the drives fails, you don’t loose everything).

http://www.lacie.com/us/produc.....?pid=10953

I dunno if they make them for Macs, so this is probably useless, but if not then I actually have something semi-worthwhile to contribute: Iomega comes with extremely easy to use auto-backup software. The Seagate my partner replaced it with has some utterly complicated autobackup software which I’ve given up even trying to use.

AVG Free Edition will do you for virus protection, just keep it updated regularly. Use Zone Alarm for a firewall too, or at least enable the Windows firewall. With those tools, and only using Firefox for browsing, I’ve never caught anything on a public network.

For clearing your machine, a combination of Spybot and Ad-Aware (also both free), and HiJack This to examine your machine processes should enable you to clear out most spyware. We’ve cleared a couple of friends’ machine that way.

Hey T -

I’ve had the best luck with Western Digital for ATA/SATA desktop drives like you’ll use for an external drive.

You can use almost any external hard drive with a Mac. All of the WD external drives can be used with Mac OS-X, but the base models will have to be reformatted for the Mac OS. If you don’t want to be bothered, the WD My Book Studio comes pre-formatted for Mac. Right now the 500GB Studio model is on sale through WD’s site for $149 - that’s a pretty good price for a Mac formatted drive.

Can’t go wrong with LaCie drives and oo la la there is a French connection to piss off a favored demographic.

Backup? Try the Time Capsule, Apple’s new hard drive with built-in wifi. Although it’s made specifically to interface with the new Mac backup system Time Machine, it’s supposed to work with other systems, too.

The Time Capsule is great. I have the 1TB model and it just sits there quietly doing it’s job so I don’t have to think about it. What’s different about Time Capsule over “just another” external hard drive is it’s an excellent wifi station (so, for example, when the L&T Casey is home from school she can use her laptop from anywhere in your house or yard through a wifi network you’ve set up and, of course, locked to exclude unwanted visitors). When Mrs. Tbogg gets her MacAir she’ll be able to do the same.

What jnfr said.

Ad-Aware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/pro.....e_free.php and Spybot Search and Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html to clean the machine (the latest Spybot has a nice inoculation feature. Nothing changes your system registry without your permission).
AVG http://free.grisoft.com/ for free anti-virus and Zone Alarm http://www.zonealarm.com/store.....nloads.jsp or Sygate http://www.filehippo.com/downl....._firewall/ for a firewall.
That should keep your non-Mac happy (a lot of that stuff runs on Macs too).

And speaking of being geek, has anyone (uh, running Windows) dared to install XP SP3 yet?

The Western Digital Studio II is a pretty nice drive, I think a 1TB (2 drives) model is around $300 bucks. Provides RAID (mirroring) and is pretty fast. Has a ton of connections USB, Firewire, e-SATA and isn’t too bad looking. Also has no fan and is very “green” since it goes to sleep and stays cool with out using extra power for cooling. You can use it as is and get 1TB of storage or choose the RAID option when you set it up and get less space, but peace of mind from data redundancy. my 2¢ worth of info. Biggest drawback: not very portable at all, it’s large.

Need help battling virii (besides San Diego republicans) drop me a line…

0. Get whatever data you need off the PC Laptop.
1. Re image the PC. You can’t win again the viruses & spy ware, nor can you ever know you got them all (That’s Microsoft’s professional advice). You might try Ubuntu instead of Windowze.
2. 1 TByte Network storage box. They are cheap. Netgear make one, looks like a toaster.

I am using a LaCie d2 Quadra (500Gb) on my powerbook G4. It is working quite well. I’m using it on a Firewire 800 port, but it also supports USB, Firewire 400, and Serial ATA. Firewire 800 is the fastest port available on the G4 Powerbook. If my mac did external Serial ATA, that’d be the way to go.
Hints: this type of drive does tend to suffer a little bit of infant mortality; don’t depend on it until it’s made it through it’s first month of service. If you look at the reviews on Newegg, all the bad reviews are from folks who got one that died days or weeks after purchase; if it lasts longer than that it’ll last a long time. Most drives from most vendors in this category will probably be about the same in this regard.
For backups, Time Machine in OX X Leopard really works. Divide the drive into two partitions, maybe one of 200Gb for time capsule and another for extra files. Just run time capsule while you’re burning in the new drive; once it’s survived its first month you can start taking the other partition seriously.

Other people have had good suggestions on what to get for a backup drive (I have a couple of LaCie drivesand a Maxtor that have been great). I have a non-rec for you. Please don’t get the Maxtor One Touch USB drive, what ever you do. I know about how long it should take to copy my files onto a drive (alright, I’m a bit obsessive about having multiple backups - I keep one at work in case something bad happens to all the ones at home), grabbed all of my music files and dragged it over to the One Touch. I figured it would take about 4 hours at most. Well, 49 hours later, it finally finished. Holy crap… Anyway, I ended up taking the drive out of the case and putting it into an Acomadata external case and now it works like it ought to.

LaCie’s Porsche firewire drives are very nice. compact, and actually look nice. Great for music, movies, etc.