[Nobody]

I am a rising freshman college engineering student. I rely heavily on my laptop. I will be taking notes on it in my classes in addition to doing homework on it. I am trying to plan backup strategy so I dont have to deal with a I lost all my work on my term paper the night before it was due because my hard drive died crisis. I also want a backup strategy that will let me avoid doing routine maintenance by allowing me to restore the last backup whenever there is a problem. I will have to do all my backups at night, and they will have to be completely automated (except for rotating media each morning). I would like to spend less than $500 but it looks like it will be more expensive than that. I will need to backup my entire hard disk which is rated as having 60GB of space but really only has 55.9GB of space.
What do you think my backup strategy should be?
Please do not read the following until you have an answer to the previous question.
Here are my own thoughts:
I figure tape drives are not an option since the only one I could find are over $900. I also figure that any type of optical storage is out because it would be too small. So I think my only options are multiple USB 2.0 or FireWire hard drives or possibly an Iomega Rev drive. Am I correct?
Is an Iomega Rev drive a possibility? Is it realistic to compress 55.9GB of data onto a 35GB Rev cartridge?
Ideally I would like to have 7 backup sets, one for each day of the week but I might cut back to as little as 4 backup sets to reduce cost.
I am debating between four 60GB external hard drives priced at $138 each plus Dantz Retrospect priced at $80 (total: $632) or an Iomega Rev drive (with Retrospect included) priced at $294 plus two 4-packs of Iomega Rev media priced at $160 each (total: $614).
What is your reaction to my thoughts?

[ALG]

I answered you on your other post and dual posting is frowned on around here so lets desert this one and go back to your other one.

[d00d]

It's here.