External hard drive recommendations

Everything is backed up on another hard drive and then backed up again on Archival Gold CD's

Now you tell us

I have an Icybox RAID NAS system, with two identical 1tb disks saving everything in duplicate. Fantastic bit of kit, automatically backing up all my stuff twice a week.... until one day my computer decided it couldn't find it anymore. Now it's a brick. If anyone knows how I could get it working again I would be very grateful. It uses Linux.

Now I use two My Passport 1tb HDD's, but I found the supplied software too buggy so have removed it.

Well to break the mood, there is no point having any number of backups if they are all saved in the same place. If your house catches fire (because of the number of hard drives running) then you might lose everything (including the DVDs you keep in the desk drawer)!

I use my laptop drive as a primary and an external hard drive as a secondary, but also use Mozy (www.mozy.com) as an offsite remote backup. It costs about £1 a week and as well as keeping all my photographs, it also backs up my music, emails, films and documents.

Because there is a web interface it even means that I can download my files anywhere in the world. So if the house does burn down it may take a while to do a full restore but I know that my files are as safe as they can be.

Hard to say without more info but if it is a usb device there are a few obvious thing you might try:

First disconnect the usb cable and restart the pc. Then plug in the NAS usb lead and switch it on. Does the system detect it now?

If not try to uninstall all software associated with the NAS drive. Google for the “Revo Uninstaller” (free version) and use that. Then restart the PC and access “device manager” for example just by typing it into help; look for any and all references to the NAS under drives, storage controllers, USB controllers, etc and uninstall. Restart the computer and reinstall the original software or if possible the latest version from the manufacturers site as per the installation instructions.

Good luck!