As part of my whole computer backup plan, I went to Simlim to get a Western Digital MyBook 320GB for $195. The cheapest available I found was the one sold by Laser Distributor at level 5. Other shops I went to generally sell at $199 or $209. There were many options I considered before I decided on this one. There are Seagate External Storage and Maxtor Basics Personal Storage editions, but both covered only by 1-year warranty. For the price, 300GB Seagate External Storage costs $179 and 320GB Maxtor Basics Personal Storage costs $188. To add less than $20 for Western Digital MyBook in order to get extra two years warranty, I thought it’s worth the price 
Of course, there are always DIY options available, with hard drives from Seagate generally backed by five-years warranty, but the warranty for its external casing was a mere six months. There are better casing with up to one-year warranty, but the casing itself cost $79. After much consideration on all my options, that’s how I decided to get Western Digital MyBook Essential Edition 320 GB.
Now, with all the artillery ready, it’s time to devise a solid backup plan for my computer to ensure that should disaster happen (like hard drive crash), I won’t lose much of what I have.
First, the drive came pre-formatted with FAT32 file system. It has limitations such as 4GB-file size limit, so I formatted using NTFS file system.
Second, not-so-important step, I like my hard drive to have nice big icons. So I found large enough image of MyBook and convert it to icon file using online ConvertIco. And here how it looks like in My Computer.
My Computer Hard Disk Drives
Third, I downloaded SyncBack (free) to take the responsibility of backing up all my stuffs automatically. It’s a superb freeware, and was highly recommended by lots of people in the forums.
Fourth, plan for the best backup timing. After thinking through few options over the 90 minutes I watched Manchester United lose 
, here are the tentative backup timing plan. All timings are suited to my lifestyle, so your timing may vary.
1. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at 12.30 AM, it’ll start backing up, and after it has finished, it’ll Hibernate my PC. The idea here is on weekdays, I should be on bed by 12.30 AM, and after finishing its job, it should save energy by turning off my PC.
2. Every Saturday and Sunday, at 12.30 AM, it’ll do the same thing, with the exception that it will NOT hibernate my PC. The idea is because on weekends, I generally use my PC beyond 12.30 AM, and I didn’t want my computer to suddenly hibernate at 12.40 AM when I’m busy playing games :p
3. Every Monday at 12.30 AM, it’ll still do the same thing, it will NOT hibernate, but for different reason. I do expect myself to be on bed at 12.30 AM Monday morning, but I scheduled my PC to do two things on Monday. First, every four weeks on Monday at 1.30 AM, PerfectDisk will defrag my disk to ensure that the performance of my disk is in tip-top condition. At 5 AM after that, Acronis TrueImage 10 Home will take over to image my Windows Vista partition and store it in MyBook. The time given should be sufficient for each process to finish, one hour for backup, 3.5 hours for defragging disk, and 2 hours for system image until I wake up the next morning at 7 AM to simply turn my PC off, then go to work hehe…
It seems like a complicated plan, but with $200, a freeware, and 15-20 minutes of my time to plan backup timings, if everything goes as planned, the most I lose from my data is 24 hours worth of data, and one-week worth of changes in my operating system. Hardly a disaster that I cannot recover from
Hopefully this guide will help you to do your own backup plans, and with small one-time cost and time, you can be saved from those disastrous days when your hard drive just crashed without warning, and save yourself from anxieties of losing all my photos, documents, files, anything you may have on your PC, not to mention the days and nights needed from rebuild your machine from scratch.
And last but not least, it IS EXPENSIVE. $1,148 with contract in Singtel or $1,220 without plan in MobileSquare.
