I have approx. 2 gigs to backup from my laptop. I have 3 other DESKTOP hard drives. I really want to backup these 2 gigs from my hard drive as I think my laptop is going south on me. Zip is too small, don't trust CD-RWs (have had horrible experiences). I can use the desktop hard drives for backup but how do I go about it. Will appreciate it if you could post details, if possible. Thanks in advance.

You say you don't trust CD-RW. Why? Backing up to optical disk is much safer than to another harddisk. Try CD-R. No chance of overwriting anything. Do you have USB access available on the Laptop. If so you can buy an enclosure for the spare harddisks. I would suggest that rather than bothering with that, just buy an external USB drive. That way you won't have any compatibilities and the cost won't be much different. Once you own an external drive do frequent backups to it.

Thanks for your response. Yeah, I've been through a lot of those "data can't be read from disk" errors even though they could be read at some point before. Yeah, I have a USB port and will check that out. Thanks again for your help Othehill!

I guess this might be a cheaper way to resolve my problem. Just found it on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=41911&item=5132287998&rd=1

If you think that is what the final bid will be, but I think you will end up paying the same, if this is new merchanise. If you anready have a CD-RW in the laptop why get an external one? Here is an example of what you can buy. If you are in the states and have bestbuy, compUSA, circuitcity, etc. they have these type of drives on sale every week. http://www.mypcgoodies.com/details.asp?item=PCG20U2-4072E I do not recommend this vendor, just pulled the first one off of Pricewatch.com