Just as a word of warning--back up anything you have on your external HDD to another format as well, like DVDs (no matter how many it may take). I bought a Seagate 1.5 TB hard drive from
Best Buy, had thousands of irreplaceable photos, hours and hours and hours of irreplaceable video, and I shudder to think how many GB my iTunes library was.
WAS. The stupid thing crashed and burned (and I wasn't even using it at the time...it was working when I went to sleep and would only make a sad little clicking noise when I woke up.) Seagate claims "there is no problem" because millions of people haven't yet complained (though
thousands have...but apparently that isn't a big enough percentage to warrant any kind of action on their part.) They said that if the drive was under warranty, they would replace it. However, they wanted $700 to retrieve my data, and even then there's no guarantee they'll be able to get a damn thing back (if there were, I'd kick out $700 in a heartbeat,, though certainly not to those %%#@#^&*&&). They offered again to replace the drive, and I said, "And what, precisely, would give you the idea that I ever wanted to so much as lay eyes on one of your products ever again, LET ALONE use one?!" Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Sorry. This happened on Aug. 4 of this year and it still hurts. A lot. It feels like someone took all of my photo albums out to the dumpster and set them ablaze. Moral of the story: don't EVER leave yourself with a single point of failure.