I need a big drive with backup features

[petemc]

I had a scare last night. My photo drive decided to stop working. I haven't backed it up in a couple of months, properly that is. I've got jpgs backed up online but not a real backup. The wedding I did recently, the books I'm working on, various other clients work was all inaccessible. Naturally it all came back after turning it off and on again but still, scary evening. The problem is that I'm working off a laptop and its started to be a bit annoying. I've got way way too much data for it and its spread out over random usb hd's. So its annoying to backup. I've only got a 100mb lan so its better to work over usb/firewire than it is a NAS drive. My initial thought is the Drobo, which I heard about via another photographer. It seems perfect. Its basically a house for hd's. You can upgrade them at your will by putting in a new hd. It manages all the data, its all backed up and if one drive fails you simply put a new one in and off you go. The problem is that its like £300 for the Drobo 2 and you have to buy hd's on top. I could get a 1tb usb drive for less than that. Time Machine on OSX is great but it only backs up my internal drive. I just want a big drive with redundancy. I don't want to faf about with backup programs, weekly backups and stuff. I just want to know that my data is safe and that all I have to do is backup the jpg's to Amazon's S3 service for offsite backup.