Are external hard drives quite robust and reliable?

I was going to get one to transfer some photos from my laptop onto for safe keeping. The other option is putting them on DVD, but i'd have to buy a dvd writer (and i cant work out how to remove the old one so need to get it fitted as well), so an external hard drive is probably about the same price.

thanks

Edit – ah i just realised i can get an external DVD writer for about £35 so that could be the best option

Id personally only use a hard drive as backup if I had another copy elsewhere as well, so I'd go with the DVD writer.

You hear of external hard drives packing up all too often.

I went for an external hard drive, but at the same time I also installed a large 2nd drive in my computer so I could keep them on there & back them up to the external hard drive.

When you say transfer your photos from your laptop, do you mean copy or move? Because if you move them to another storage media without keeping the originals (to free up space or whatever) you aren't actually backing anything up.

I went for a hard drive over dvds as I am pretty lame at organising things – so if I'd have used dvds I would now have a pile of unlabeled dvds on my desk that would have probably been used as drink coasters and therefore next to worthless.
With the hard drive, I just plug it in once a month & do a back up of everything and I don't have to worry about labelling stuff/where I'm gonna store piles of DVDs etc.

You can also back up online to places like smugmug. I keep meaning to look into this. It's something like $20 a yr for a heap of disc space & might be worth using as a further storage area for important bits & pieces.

not so sure about dvds but i've some old photo cds that have started to look like they are delaminating – i don't expect them to be around in 20 years
i use a portable drive and on line back up

Online backup is a good idea.

Even if it's just putting your photos on flickr or facebook. But keep copies elsewhere too.

Both

And leave the disks at work or with someone else.

external hard drive and allway sync, that way as soon as you import any new photos from your camera they are backed up on the external drive.

Recommended back-up strategy is 3 copies used in rotation, amended for available stores use discs, on line and external hard-drive (regularly replace the DVD back-ups though).