So why don’t I care? Because I back up my drives. All the time. Both on-site (as in, to another drive in the house) and to the cloud. All my data is safe.

Don’t believe it can happen to you? Look at it this way: there isn’t a lot of meaningful data available to users on what the lifespan of a hard drive should be, but probably the most best way to look at things is the service life of a drive, or its warranty life. For example, Western Digital offers a 5 year warranty on its drives – which isn’t to say drives won’t fail in under 5 years, just that the amount of failures is acceptable to WD from a business perspective. So as a rule of thumb, it might be reasonable to expect a desktop drive to last about 5 years, and a notebook drive (which operates under more demanding conditions) to go about 2-1/2 or 3 years. Anything beyond that, and you’re probably on borrowed time.

OK, so if drives are pretty great, and my computer is reasonably new, why do I need to backup? 3 huge reasons:
1) Drives fail, all the time, no matter where they are in their service life. It’s a bell curve, and some drives will fail early.
2) Bad people steal computers, with all your photos on them. It happens to working professionals – a wedding shooter in Seattle had her office broken into about 2 years ago and not only did she lose all her camera gear and PC equipment, she lost two weddings worth of photos – gear can be replaced, memories cannot. Painful if they’re your memories. Professionally disasterous if they’re someone else’s memories.
3) Fires, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, etc all happen. Not likely, but they do, no matter where you live.

I can’t stress enough – the most important thing is make this an automatic process! Don’t rely on yourself to back up every night, because chances are it won’t happen, and failures have this sneaky way of happening just when you got a little lazy and haven’t backed up in a month or two or more. And because of #2 and #3 above, backup needs to be not just in your office, but also somewhere offsite. Either keep an external hard drive at a friend’s house, or mail DVDs to your parents once a month, use a free online service (which probably won’t be enough, once you start uploading), or subscribe to a service like Mozy or Carbonite that do online backup (these are nice because it’s all automated, again, it’s much better when your backup is fully automated). Think of the cost as part of your homeowner’s or business insurance if it makes you feel better.

All these things happen, and if you don’t have your photos backed up onto a separate hard drive, and preferable also to a second physical location or in the cloud, you are at risk of losing images that you cannot replace.

Backing up got a little bit faster though – USB 3.0 was announced at CES in January, and Seagate is now shipping one of the first USB 3.0 portable external hard drives. It even comes with an add-in PC card for today’s laptops that don’t yet have USB 3.0 built in. The drive inside is a 7,200 rpm drive (like most desktop drives) as opposed to the 5,400 rpm drives in most portable external storage, and throughput is fast – up to 5 Gbps. What does that mean in real-world terms? According to cnet, about twice as fast as the fastest current-generation external drives.

Image via CNET reviews

Side note for Mac users, the drive comes formatted for Windows and the the included backup software and drivers for the add-in card, for now, are Windows only. Price is listed at $179.

Read the full review here.