In the beginning was The Mainframe. It came from IBM, as did all the peripherals… at an outrageous price. Along came an upstart called EMC who could sell us disk to work with The Mainframe. Not only did the EMC disk cost less than IBM’s, it could also be connected to our Unix systems. And thusly, did the EMC arrays come forth and multiply, until they numbered 13.
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June is “Backup Awareness Month”, according to Seagate / Maxtor. They’ve got a site with some tips for users. Options for Stanford users include those listed on backup.stanford.edu.

There’s one important principal to remember: you should not keep your data and your backups in the same place. If you use a laptop and an external backup drive, leave the drive in your office: your laptop is more likely to be damaged outside your office. If you burn CDs or use USB memory sticks, don’t keep them in your laptop bag; if you use a desktop computer, don’t keep the CDs or memory sticks in your office.

External hard drives often come with backup software for Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X. As an example, Seagate has drives from a 5GB pocket drive up to a 750GB drive that can sit on your desk. Other disk vendors include Maxtor, which is now part of Seagate, Western Digital; many smaller companies sell external drives based on drives from those vendors.