I should relate our experiences. We've just been away for 3 months. We have 3 backups - a spare PC with a large hard drive which acts as our file server and is also the backup for our hard drives, an external Lacie hard drive which was stored in a bank vault, and DVD backups. Critical items are also stored with other people off-site, both on optical media and on other PCs.

When we returned the file server refused to boot up and we had to install the hard drive in another PC - it took several hours of work over 2 days to finally get it to boot up. We went to the bank vault and collected the hard drive there, and it doesn't start up. (Google suggests that this is now a known problem with this particular Lacie external hard drive, and it seems that no-one has recovered data from one).

It was a bit worrying for a while and we are now looking for a better option.

Audrey