All my pictures and files and such are on a removable hard drive. What is the easiest and cost effective method to create a backup of that drive, so that if my computer crashes and that drive crashes I can still access all these important things? Is there a method to just buy a second removable drive? Online? On DVD’s?
A second external hard drive is the easiest way to do this. You just hook it up via a USB cable (get one that doesn’t require external power if you can) and either drag and drop your valuable files directly on the new one to make a copy or use software like Reflect (free) to make an exact image of your existing drive. Keep the new drive updated but also put it in a safe place in between backups.
You can also buy USB flash drives for not much money but they are smaller in capacity than most external drives but they are physically tiny and very portable as well which handy. You can also use an online backup service like www.mozy.com for free or little cost. You can burn CD’s or DVD’s but it is a pain and they are the lowest capacity option of the bunch. I would pick at least two of these as your backup options to be extra safe. You can get a good external hard drive for about $80 or so and flash drives are even cheaper but it depends on the capacity you need.
There are a bunch of options in a wide range of prices out there.
I don’t think cost effective can be easily calculated without knowing what size the hard drive in question is.
After yet another computer failure, I bought a few new hard drives. One is plugged into the router via ethernet and acts as network attached storage (NAS). This gets regular backups (daily for really critical data) and acts as a lightweight home file and media server . The second is a basic USB hard drive. It’s meant to be a somewhat more permanent backup, so it’s usually safely boxed up somewhere. Every so often, about once a month or so, I pull it out and make fresh backups of the important or sentimental files. That cost around $200 for a pair of 1.5 tb hard drives. Since you’ve already got an external, you could probably get away with just buying a second, and as other posters have mentioned you can get reasonably large hard drives for $60.
You can used DVDs, of course, but it’s a bit of a hassle to burn a fresh one every week, and it’s not a lot of storage for data-hungry stuff like big photo collections.
1 terra byte external hard drives are going for about $90 these days. 500 Gig are about $55. That is cheaper than buying DVD RW in bulk.
For backing things up a new external hard drive is totally the way to go. If you have more than about 15 Gigs of stuff to back up the swapping out of the DVDs will become just to much of a pain.
You can get a Western Digital USB 1TB External Hard Drive for under $85 here: http://www.eworldsale.com/western-digital-wdbaau0010hbk-nesn-elements-desktop-hard-drive-1tbusbexternal_5644_50213.html. I have a similar Western Digital 640GB drive and it works as advertised: just plug it into the USB port and go.
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Why fiddle with multiple DVDs when you can back up your whole drive for such a reasonable price?
I have two 2tb hitachi drives and (knock wood) they are doing great. I also have a few 1tb Hitachi external drives that are holding up well. Again knock wood 
I would like to make a strong suggestion. If you get an external hard drive or a hard drive and put it in an external case, try to get one with an eSata port. You can put in an eSata port on your computer really cheap, for under $6.00 (I put two in my desktop for $6.00) and an eSata is SO much faster than a USB port.
Small correction: the 1TB Western Digital drive I mentioned above (unlike my 640GB) does use a separate power adapter (included, of course).
And if you do get an external HDD, I suggest you take a look at Retrospect for backups. The program is a little difficult, but once you learn it, it backs up everything on your system, including the Registry.
If you ever have a crash, you can use their Disaster boot CD and do a Restore from that, and you are right back in business.
Back up irreplaceable content at multiple places – another hard drive, DVDs, and off-site storage. Just have all your bases covered. That’s what I do.
You also have to think about whether you want to just be able to do disaster recovery or add some extra functionality that you don’t have already. I am head of IT for an industrial facility and I already have triple backups of my personal things. My external hard-drive is small and quiet and a painless way to do backups nightly in case my system crashes but it won’t survive theft or a fire.
I have online backups through mozy.com that can be technically accessed from anywhere there is an internet connection but the restores take some time to build and aren’t really for regular use even for individual files.
For my job, I bought a Corsair Survivor flash drive. It costs much more per gigabyte than an external drive but it is meant it is built to industrial specifications that can survive just about anything including being run over by a truck (literally) or being dropped in 600 feet of water. I get way more use out of that drive than I anticipated for both home and work use. I keep it on my key chain and it has all of my important documents, photos, music collection, and even a few of my favorite movies and most of my favorite videos on it. I always have it on me and that has proved to be invaluable even for casual use. Imagine having most of your most important things in a sealed tube in your pocket at all times that you can access from almost any modern computer just by unscrewing the cap and plugging it in. That is useful. Regular flash drives can do the same thing but they tend to be cheaply made and break easily through repeated use or get destroyed if you put them through the washer. This one won’t.
Oddly enough, it seems that my primary home computer lost its hard drive today. It is a paperweight at this point and I have done everything I can to fix it. I am posting this from my laptop. I would be devastated but I have all of the backups in place just to make it just a minor hassle. My external hard drive has a complete image as of three days ago and the really important stuff is on my key chain. It can be restored from the web as well as of last night. It doesn’t cost much money to have those protections in place even for the average consumer and that was the stuff of the major league IT people just a few years ago. I just need to buy a new hard drive and reimage it.