Your best bet is probably an external drive. Don't fiddle about with small ones, you are going to take more and more pictures as time goes by, so go with a decent-size unit: 200GB as a minimum, 250GB or 300GB is better.
The best way to do this is to buy an external case (a little thing about the size of a largish paperback novel). USB or Firewire, or better yet, a "combo case" that does both. You can buy these at any computer shop. Cost around $50AU, so maybe E20.
Then buy a drive to go into it. Samsung make the most reliable drives on the market at present, if you can't get a Samsung try Hitachi. Avoid Western Digital - they are going through a bad patch right now and their drives tend to be fast but fragile. Buy it from someone you trust not to bash it about in the warehouse - hard drives are very delicate precision devices, and you need to handle them with the same care you'd use for an expensive lens. If that means paying an extra E20, who cares?
Now you have a readily upgradable, readily repairable backup system. All you need to do is at appropriate intervals - once a week or once a month is reasonable - plug the drive in and then drag and drop your new files over onto the external drive. You should be able to start the copy inside 10 seconds - if you can't because it's too fiddly to select files scattered all over the place, then your computer method is disorganised and you need to rethink it. (Computers store so much data that you have to be organised about it - otherwise you are nostril deep in chaos every working day.) Then go away and drink a cup of tea while the data copies. Finally, disconnect the external drive and store it somewhere else!
Leaving the drive plugged in is easy and very tempting: but it's not really a backup at all if you do that. While the drive is plugged in it is vulnernable to power surges, fire, lightning strike, virus attack, user error, computer crashes, and every other risk you can think of. Once you unplug the drive and put it (gently!) somewhere else (such as at your office instead of home, or your brother's house, anywhere in a different building is good) you are very safe indeed.
A better method still is to use two external drives and swap them over alternately. You wind up with a system like this:
* Main drive: all my data
* Backup #1 all my data up to January this year
* Backup #2 all my data up to February this year
At the end of this month, I copy the last couple of month's worth of pictures over to Backup #1, then take it to the office for safekeeping. that gives me:
* Main drive: all my data
* Backup #1 all my data up to March this year
* Backup #2 all my data up to February this year
See the logic? I can lose any single drive and the worst that can happen is that I lose <30 days worth of data. I can lose two drives (big power surge while I was doing my month-end backup let's say) and I still have all my data except for the last 50-offdd days' worth. And this is on a fairly unrealistic and very lazy once-a-month backup schedule. In reality, you'd backup any time you take important pictures - every Sunday night in my case, after I get home from a field trip.
Total cost for a 2-drive system: less than half the price of a Canon 10-22mm lens. I don;t know how that translates into Nikkor terms, but you get the idea.
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