You could back up onto the external over the weekend, then take it to work or something during the week, or maybe put it in the trunk of your car.

I'd say the best way to protect yourself from losing the entire music library is to have a backup that is kept in a storage facility or a safe deposit box. You can then update the drive every few months.

Hrm...my issue with storing a hard drive off site is that I may be too lazy to keep it up to date. Whereas, if I use an online service, there is very little effort required.

Mozy and Jungle Disk seem like pretty cheap solutions. If it comes in around ~$5/mos, that may even beat out an external drive stored in a safety deposit box.

I store mine in the CD cases that they came in. :P

This, and I also keep backup copies stored on thousands of computers all over the world.

I store mine in the CD cases that they came in. :P

A what now?

I use Mozy, and also, my MP3 player itself is kind of a backup. I have in the past restored from my player back to the computer.

And like octothorpe, 99% of my music is also on CD, but it's taken me years to rip it all, so I wouldn't want to go through all THAT again.

All forms of online storage will continue to be expensive. I do this:

I have two 250 gb drives. Every month I use FastCopy (super fast free utility that can sometimes copy at a 100x than standard windows copy) and differentially backup music/photos/media. I leave one locked in my work filing cabinet. The other is in my parents house.
I also backup email (have every email since 1995) and documents. These are worst case backups.

I also regularly backup everything on a 500gb Western Digital.

Day to day files (word, spreadsheet, pdf, code, raw data) goes on Mozy, Amazon S3 (using Jungle Disk) and my backup server at work (next building over), which then gets backed up on tape drives (somewhere else in town). A lot has to go wrong at the same time for me to lose my files.

special-k: Wow, that's intense. Since you use both, what do you think of Mozy vs. Jungle Disk? I'm leaning to Jungle Disk because it seems more flexible (mounting it as a network drive, for example).

I like S3 better than Mozy because it mounts as a network drive on all of my computers. I mostly use it to store important files that I access on a regular basis (nothing big like music/movies). It works out a lot cheaper than Mozy (because you only pay for what you store/transfer). If these are just docs, then even a ton of those take up very little space. My monthly charge is always less than $2. Jungle Disk is also just $20 one time + lifetime upgrades.

Only reason I use Mozy is because I signed up for free ages ago and referred a bunch of friends. So I ended up getting several gigs more (also for free). Getting files back from Mozy is not as convenient as Amazon.

We're supposed to back up our music files?

Time Machine on a 1TB external.