New External HDD

[#1]

As a follow up to my other post on an external HDD problem I thought it wise to purchase a replacement drive even though  SMART showed no errors, reading through the feedback on Amazon and other sites it was difficult to know what to go for as all makes seemed to a number of negative reports on drives failing in the short term.
Decided to go for a Imation ApolloD200 Hard Drive 1TB i27385 from Amazon (Which they now show as out of stock) but the interesting thing is that it includes a 5 year warranty.
I am aware this does not cover data loss but everything important is backed up on a second drive for good measure.
Only time will tell if it's a good purchase or not.

[#2]

Do a search on rsync and cygwin - relatively easy to set up and if you set schedules to backup both drives (effectively mirroring them periodically) then you'll be a lot safer

[#3]

Thanks for that, there was a free backup program which was already on the disk but have not had the chance to look at it yet.