external hard drive? which one?

Hey everyone I have an external hard drive question.
I work for a landscape architectural firm and we are going to buy an exteral hard drive to back up our .dwg and graphic files.

A buddy of mine says he just bought one for his firm and they just back up their files every night before they leave and take the drive with them in case of fire or theft .

We are going to mimic this setup.

He said after the inital copying of all the files over to the drive, you can just select the folders you want to copy on a daily basis and it will only overwrite the files that have changed.

I did a little research and saw that maxtor has a piece of bundled software that looks like it does that but I am not sure.

I am wrting this thread to ask others that either have one or know of one that does something similar to this before I go and spend 300 dollars on a drive that takes forever to backup everyday.

I want to ability to plug in the drive at 4 pm every day and let it run in the background without sucking my memory dry. I hope I can set it up to only copy the folder I want and boom click a button and let her rip.

Any help would be appreciated.

Doug

anyone have any advice?

Well, it's probably gonna work out cheaper to buy a USB2 box, and a 120Gig or bigger hard drive separately...

You'll find good deals on USB1 external drives & cases these days, but they're horrendously slow if you're copying over huge amounts of data compared to USB2.

Is this http://www.maxstore.com/searchcat.asp?search_id=3 what your looking at ?

IF its simplicity your looking for one of the products from this link looks ideal to me. May be cheaper to build your own external as AXE said but then you have to find a program for backing up as well.

My advice, go for it

do you guys know of anything along the lines of that maxtor drive that can act as a NAS (network attatched storage)? i'd like to find one i can connect to my LAN through ethernet rather than USB or firewire.

mark

I just found theese
http://www.ximeta.com/products/netdisk.php

160 gig at bestbuy $249.99
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1064607241203&skuId=6079263&type=product

thanks for the tip, joebert. they're hard to find, aren't they? all i've been able to find are for small businesses, and are around $1000. at least the one you suggested is semi-affordable. what did you use for a search string?

mark

"ethernet""external hard drive" with quotes, I followed the first google result, which took me to a review page that had a link to the company, which pointed me to bestbuy as one of thier resellers