I need an external (USB2 or Firewire) drive of at least 200GB capacity. I had Firelite recommended to me, but I haven't found any of their drives that were that big.

I'd also love for it to be simple to back up both my PC and my Mac.

You could buy that $60 drive and get a USB enclosure.

What Gud said. My $25 firewire/USB enclosure (it's for laptop HDs or I'd give you a link) works perfectly, and I think that's pretty much the norm.

Also, if you format the external HD with FAT32, it will work fine for both Windows and Mac uses, though part of the Mac data might get lost if you're trying to back up data that relies on Resource forks - however, very very few things do, these days, so I wouldn't worry about that. I'm using the commandline tool "rsyncbackup" (just a frontend to the unix rsync tool, very nicely designed) to do semi-regular syncs of my music, movies, documents, and so forth from my mac to a folder on the FAT32 disc, and I'm sure there are equivalent progs for Windows.

ETA: Of course, 3.5" HDs aren't very svelte. Those Firelite drives probably use 2.5" laptop HDs, like my enclusure does, but those are still pretty hard to get in sizes as big as 200 GB. If portability is not an option, 3.5" drive + enclosure is def' the best way to go.

ETA 2: Seagate makes a 180 GB 2.5" drive, but it's $330 on Other World Computing. I really don't think small + 200 GB + affordable is going to be possible for a while.

I want backup software too, though. I'm not into managing full/incremental/whatevers. That's why I was leaning towards a bundled sort of solution.

But I have no idea how good the software that comes with those things is--if it's even worth it.

I very seriously doubt it comes with any software you couldn't just buy and STILL be cheaper, and in my experience software that comes bundled isn't generally the best available anyway. I'd do some research on backup software before going for a bundle.

I didn't even know there was HD to HD backup software on the market.

I will have to have a look.

The Seagate drive I just got came with some sort of backup software, but I didn't look at it because I already have Ghost (which I love).

I did have Ghost recommended. Maybe I should just go that way.

Are you looking just to back up data, like I do with my music and such, or do you want full, bootable clones of your drives?

The first option doesn't require partitioning if you're willing to keep the whole drive in FAT32, and has several freeware solutions on a Mac. As I said, I use rsyncbackup, which is a command-line frontend to rsync controlled by easy-to-edit text files. Other options include PsyncX, which appears to be a GUI frontend to both psync and cron, so it can even schedule regular backups for you. Also, Lacie Silverkeeper, which is packaged with LaCie externals but is also available freely from versiontracker. With any of these three free utilities, it shouldn't be more than an hour's work to set up data backups that run regularly.

The second option requires partitioning your external drive into a Mac Portion and a Windows Portion - the Mac portion being, ideally, at least the same size as your Mac drive. Once that's done, though, PsyncX and rsyncbackup can be used to make bootable clones, or you can use the venerable $5 Carbon Copy Cloner to schedule regular clones on the Mac end.

Finally, if you want the most flexibility and power in Macland, check out SuperDuper!, a $27.95 shareware utility that appears to be able to do, well, just about anything you could want backup-wise (including both of the above things, of course), and has a perfect 5.0 rating on versiontracker, so it's probably quite nice.

I'm sure judicious research could find similar progs on Windows, but I wouldn't really know where to start - is there a website with Windows downloads that's actually as well maintained and near-universal as versiontracker? Probably not.

ETA: Looks like Ghost may be a good option in windows. A bit expensive for my tastes, but I'm a minimalist. For the best combination of ease and power, Ghost + SuperDuper would probably work quite nicely for you.

Ah, dammit. I was told that Ghost would work on Macs too. That seems to not be supported.

Thanks for the recs, D.