i don't own more storage drives because i need the space, i do it to back up what i have.
i own two external drives (WD 320GB and Seagate 500GB) which backup my MBP's system, music, movies, photos, etc. each drive also contains about 200GB worth of RAW photos from my photography. to be extra cautious, i periodically burn multiple copies of DVDs for the RAW files as well and ship them to parents/friends for storage (in case something happens to my place).

I dislike the poll opinions, 4 and no it isn't getting ridiculous, they are small, out of the way and I need them. One for general back up, one for photo storage, one for photo back up, and one to keep all those video archives off my computer.

I have two Seagate 750 drives. One backs up my iMac and the other is for Tivo transfers (well, it was before they started blocking the transfer of cable shows two weeks ago).

funstraw: haha, I had no idea people would feel so attached to their drives and was really just making light of my own situation. I sometimes feel like they're a small gang ready to jump me, these hard drives.

Just bought my second a couple weeks ago - a 2001 monolith-style MyBook. It'll hold a little shy of 1TB, so alongside my 250gb external enclosure-housed drive and my laptop's internal 80gb drive, I don't think I'll be needing any more drives for a while.

i have one LaCie 250GB (unattached) drive full of old work that i'll need to get to one day

and one LaCie 150GB drive that i backup to everyday.

i'm much more pragmatic when it comes to storage now, as for years i would backup everything from emails to short animation films. now i try to backup only things i'll actually need, which leads to being able to function with smaller drives. if i were a freelancer like the other commenters appear to be - i would live on a raid.

i think upgradable-Wireless NAS backup is where we're all headed.

Whenever I buy a new laptop, I take the old one out and find a case on amazon/newegg. It is WAY cheaper then buying one at Bestbuy.

Gregory, This one isn't as bad but there are other polls on the AT network in which the opinion is completely off from the answer.

I have a 500GB desktop and a 160GB portable drive. Then I got an iPod Touch, which made my 60GB iPod Video redundant, so I started using that as a backup drive as well. (Yes, they pretty much contain all the same data. Yes, I am paranoid of data loss.)

As long as your backup routine is easy and consistent, you can never have too many backups!

I have two. 360mb and 1tb. Hard drive failure happens and I don't keep all my files on my computer. So this way I have some redundancy.

Like Matt, I've been thinking about if something were to happen to my place (fire, theft, etc.). I'm not a big fan of burning a bunch of DVDs though. I've been toying with the idea of keeping one somewhere else and just bringing it in to do a backup every like say month or so. If something happens to the onsite drive, I'd lose at most a month which will suck, but better than possibly losing everything.

What about an RAID? That way you get two mirrored drives in one unit. Save files, save clutter.

this post reminds me I need to backup ASAP to my two hard drives. I have one My Book 500GB and one My Passport 320gb. I would love to get a 1TB. I wanted to convert all my movies after I saw that post on Unplggd.

I use to have one that I got a hard drive enclosure for and my dog tipped it over. It didn't fall off a table or anything but in that little fall just on to its side killed it! Got a replacement they sent me & a year later same exact same thing happened. Don't know if that's common in internal hard drives made into external hard drives but I guess I'm just lucky that way. Losing pretty much everything makes me really paranoid about losing my files, photos and videos. I'm constantly adding to my Vimeo, photobucket, snapfish, ect just in case.

I currently have 3 external hard drives (which will go up to 4 whenever I stop being lazy and replace my laptop's hard drive, putting the old one in an external case). I use two of them for backing up my two computers and one for video storage. However, in time I'd like to have a nice large raid array for storing videos/music/movies on.

I have one 1TB external drive that I use with a media server and my ps3 for all my shows and movies instead of cable. I have a feeling Ill need another one in a couple months though.

Update to my previous comment: Looking around me, I now have 6 (!) external hard drives. Two Mac-formatted, two NTFS and two FAT32. Plus I have a 32GB flash drive.