Costco has a 1TB external hard drive (the western digital myBook) for $168 with firewire + usb2. Fry’s has a 1TB for $140 but it’s USB2 only. I have the one from costco, it works just great.

Don’t buy LaCie disks.

I have 2.5TB total on all my drives and keep redundant copies (high definition video, hi-resolution photos) on them. I back up by hand only (I too don’t have good experiences with backup software).

Memory sticks are getting cheaper and cheaper, here’s a 1GB usb flash memory for 95 cents. link

It’s almost worth it to get a dozen or so of those with labels to back up stuff.