I'm planning to use external disk drives for backup. I'm looking at
the nicely packaged enclosures from Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate.

I am transitioning from VXA-2 tape to the Western Digital USB2
200 GB external drive. Works very well. Make sure that you
have a power transformer, USB cord, etc at your offsite. Be sure
to get at least double the capacity of your backup.

This drive comes formatted FAT32. I still have yet to figure out
how they formatted it that way since the biggest FAT32 drive is
suppose to be 128 GB.

I don't know how wise it is to carry around 3.5 inch disk drives all
the time. These drives are designed for desktop use, after all.

If you drop it, test it and if it fails, throw it away and redo your
backup as soon as possible. At least you are not carrying a box
of 20 nine track tapes (been there, done that, got the tshirt).

Lynn