Hi,
I would be grateful for feedback on the following.

At some point in time, I preferred to backup data and software on disks
on separate machines so as to be able to have incremental backups. Use
of CD/DVD R or RW was not adequate, as they frequently went bad, kept incoherent trail of updates or simply could not be updated. Thus, I settled for having material on multiple drives.



I've been having disk crash on my computers at home (with Maxtor drives) and some informal
investigations suggested Western Digital harddrives were among the best
on the market. Unfortunately, I suddenly lost my laptop and two western
digital internal disk drives, and one external drive (also a Western
digital), sort of without warning. Ironically, the Fijutsu drive on a clone I had 10 years ago, and bought the WD for fear it might fail, is working (it fails the S. M. A. R. T. boot test sometimes)!

My questions are:
QUESTION 1
What is the best approach to handle incremental backup data, if hard disks are not that reliable this days? (This is a home system, and tape drives and variants are out!)


QUESTION 2)
Which are the best marks of hard drives to purchase, especially for linux-based systems that can be on for relatively long periods -- 6-24 hours a day?

REgards,

William.