Saab -yep am aware of the deletion issue, but am confident that I won't delete owt by accident! Always use shift+del anyhoo!
As for regular backups, manage to keep about ten copies of stuff all over the place so not too much of a snag, just prefer to have one device that's reliable for day to day use, happy to use a wee little passport to keep the truly important stuff (eg photos) safely backed up elsewhere.
Mac, have considered the old pc issue as I have quite a few kicking about, but short of some re-investment in new silent psu & heatsink they'd be far too noisy for my current environment, and also a little on the large size (am somewhat space limited in my one room with all my outdoors gear!). Icybox looks a good solution, will probably go down that road I suspect.
(PS anyone know anything about how you go about recovering a RAID 1 array with a single disk failure, is it as simple as just cracking straight on from the copy disk?)