Drives seem to fail more slowly these days, and many people have some form of RAID. Theft actually hit us at home, and my wife was in the midst of an important application, so I got lots of brownie points for restoring things quickly.more frequent hard drive failure
Neither was I. USB disks aren't ideal, but then no portable disks are. Alternatives would be eSATA or go the whole hog and use LTO6sNot sure about USB sticks though
