As I start to take more photographs, I am constantly becoming more aware of just how important these files are to me, and I am looking for some backup measures.

I currently have a Western Digital Elements 1TB USB external drive, but this does not have any automatic backup systems, which differs from better WD drives.

For continuity and maximum compatibility, I will be buying another of these drives. I am just wondering how I can get the drives to automatically backup, and have one as a redundant system for the other.

I believe this would be a RAID 1 type set up?

How could I do this? I know I could just copy and paste, but USB really isn't that fast and it took me for ever to copy the thousands of photos from my internal drive to my external when I first bought it! I really want a 'fire and forget' method where it will just sort out my files for me. Drobo looks like a possible investment for the future too. Size isn't the problem, don't get me wrong, I will probably never fill a single one of these drives, but they are affordable and I need backup rather than spare space.


On an unrelated note: I am running out of USB connections. I have seen 'splitters' which turn 1 USB into about 5, but are these worth buying? I believe there's something stupid like 512 or 1024 possible USB expansions from one slot, but in a practical sense, will a standard 1-to-5 splitter be okay? I would try and keep my externals on their own USB slot, but for things like a joystick, webcam, phone cable, camera cable, etc... Will these be impaired by using the same USB slot simultaneously?


Cheers!

You could try http://download.cnet.com/Second-Backup-Free-Edition/3000-2242_4-10405044.html it is free and does all you need