CNET editor Dong Ngo rounds up five external hard drives that make the best backup drives.

The last Saturday of March is World Backup Day, and you'll see a lot of storage vendors taking this occasion to pitch their products for backup purposes. I am about to do a similar thing, but from a very different point of view: yours.

None of the vendors goes as far as guaranteeing the integrity of storage on their products. At most, a vendor would give you a new product to replace the broken one, or in the currently unique case of IoSafe, offer to pay up to a certain amount toward data recovery. I, on the other hand, promise, if not guarantee, that if you follow my advice, your data will be safe.

The truth is that backing up is a personal matter that needs to be taken care of on a regular basis -- even daily, if possible. The key thing is to store copies of data in multiple places and never rely on just one medium for your important, irreplaceable data.

Note that commercial movies, music, and other purchasable digital content are replaceable. It's great that you can back everything up, but most of the time, the personal information that you really need to safeguard takes up very little storage space.

Up-to-date backups of your data are like insurance; you need it and at the same time hope to never have to resort to it.

The second thing to note is that even a brand-new hard drive can die at any time, without any warning. You can always lose your portable drive, and your online storage service can go out of business all of sudden. You need to act when everything is in working order -- which can give you a false sense of safety -- because otherwise, most of the time, it's just too late. And let me say this once more time: never use just one medium to keep your important, irreplaceable data.

Up-to-date backups of your data are like insurance; you need it and at the same time hope to never have to resort to it. There are many ways to keep your data safe and you can find out about different types of backups here.

To make it easier, in this roundup, however, I'll focus on external hard drives, which are the most popular, affordable, and easiest way to back up (and restore) data. Even better: you only have to pay for them once. Here are my choices for the top five external hard drives that are great ways to keep your data safe. They are formatted for Windows but can be easily reformatted to work with Macs. They are listed in order of seriousness, with the most casual -- and affordable -- drives on top.

WD 2TB My Passport Western Digital's 2TB My Passport is the world's first portable drive that offers 2TB of storage space. This is about as large as you can get from a 2.5-inch-based external hard drive given the current perpendicular recording technology. Despite this top capacity, the drive is very compact and is bus-powered. All you need is the included standard Micro-USB 3.0 cable for it to work. (The drive works with both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.)

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Top 5 external drives: Backing up is a personal matter