As everyone knows we have a very large music library as well as music videos and karaoke files. We are 100% electronic (no fumbling around looking for a song on a CD or DVD).

Anyhow, I don't want to ever take a chance of loosing our files. The military part in me always wants to make sure we have a Plan B in the event of hardware failure.

So what happens for protection to ensure the event goes on.

(2) laptops. Primary is a MacBook Pro which has been VERY reliable. Backup is a Dell Latitude that is only used as a backup.

(2) external harddrives formated in FAT (MS-DOS) so they can be read by Mac OS X and Windows.

Using my Apple as my primary to import and play music the two drives are added to the Mac as a RAID(1) which means they are mirrored between each other anytime they are both plugged into my Mac at the same time. Ref: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2559

If one hard-drive fails or is removed, then I still have everything on the other drive.

I also utilize these Lacie 1TB drives that don't require any separate power when used with my MacBook. With Windows I need to use a power supply.

I first tried to format the LaCie little big disk QUADRA 1TB drives as MS-DOS so if my Mac ever failed I could take the drive(s) and plug into the USB port with the LaCie supplied power supply, into my backup Windows machine.

During testing it didn't work and from what I have read online, MS-DOS can't really support a 1TB size. Of course I was able to copy all my music over to it and was working fine on my Mac, just not working fine on Windows.

So my thought was, if it isn't going to work on Windows anyhow, I would much rather have these drives formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which means ACL's work, Meta Data works and everything just runs smoother on the Mac side of the house. Now to get my backup laptop to work I have to purchase a program called MacDrive by a company called Mediafour.