Yeah, you should be able to back an external to another external! I have friends who have 2 or 3 externals linked to back up each other.That is awesome you will have over 4 TB of memory! :P Soon Ipods will have that. I just have my 160 gd hard drive in my laptop... I do not save pictures or videos to my laptop... They get uploaded to a site then deleted off my memory cards. I know, not the best backup haha. 

i should start doing all this as well. i have 1 500gb external hard drive but i havent used it to back up my files in monthes.

Jul 25, 2010 -- 10:48PM, The Nielsons - Family #12 wrote:

Well those of you out there Living in HD know that it takes an extreme amount of space on your computer to do so and here's is where I need some help. For quite a while now my Final Cut Express software hasn't been opening. Since I was't ready to move out of the comfort of iMovie this didn't really matter. Finally I'm ready to make the move to FCE. Although it's been a good friend to me and it has made it easy for me to preserve all the wonderful memories that I've captured with my AWESOME Panasonic gear, I have to admit that I'm getting a little bored with iMovie and it's limited transitions & titles and ready to do some real creating! Problem is FCE won't open. I think it won't open because there's not enough room left on my drive, so I'm looking for the best solution.  Right now I have a 1TB external drive that backs up all the data on my Mac and it also holds my ENTIRE iPhoto library (BTW this drive is alrady FULL!). This is more than a little scary because if it died I'd lose all my pics. I'm thinking about getting another external HD (3 TB) and then copying what's on my 1TB to the 3TB and have the 3TB HD serve as my back-up for both the HD on my Mac and for my 1TB hard drive. Then I would move my video library to my 1TB drive, so I could have enough room to work with Final Cut Express and not have to worry about losing any of my data. Problem is, I don't really know what I'm talking about and in theory this sounds good, but is it actually possible? Can you back-up one external HD with another external HD? If anyone can answer this question or has a better suggesting on how to store all my AVCHD video and still have enough roon to run programs, I'd love to hear them. Hope I get some posts soon and Thanks!

Cindy, great point: Digital advances like LiHD are storage intensive. I'll send you my contact info, wish I saw this sooner, anyhoo:

On Windows machines you have to do a defragmentation of your harddrive every so often. This is usually called a defrag in gamer and tech circles. I'm not up on my Mac certification (learning Linux but anyway...) like I used to be but I suspect you have to do some data storage maintenance at some period of time. Knowing Apple it prolly has some cute name ;-)

Red flags: full storage. Even external HDDs need some room to breathe, it could be as few as 100MB or 500MB, but leave space on any drive.

I wouldn't "daisy chain" the HDDs. MOVE all the 1TB to the 3TB and when you are done with a project on the Mac save to the 3TB. I would use the 1TB for just "in progress" projects only. Not sure if that's what you meant, if it is then yes.

Redundancy in data backup is the only way to be safe. So burn projects to DVD, esp completed projects. I have 1 CD case (100 capacity) that has every project from my DELL 8200 that died a week after I got my toughbook. Talk about TIMING! I'm going to resurrect it as a Linux server with a different HDD. But I have the HDD and a CD-R archive, labeled and organized.

I'd suggest that as a data backup plan. All tech fails at some point and that's why I have floppies, Zip discs, CD-Rs, DVD-RWs in addition to full HDDs for every PC I've ever owned. Sure that is fanatical but I am a fanatic.

Hope this helps. Cheers!