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Why Not Backup To External Hard Drive?

You have to plug them in and unplug regularly. Otherwise it is not really a backup.
Even more hassle if you have more than one computer to back up.
In case of theft, it is more likely than not that the external hard drive may be stolen together with the computer it supposed to back up. The same with flood, fire, power spikes and so on, unless you actually take time to rotate several external hard drives and always take the latest one off-site.
Sometimes software problems occur during the backup process and data can be lost on both – the local hard drive and the external hard drive. The same can happen in case of viruses.
Many of them store only one last version of the backup, but if you discover a corrupted file it is likely that you’ve been backing it up already corrupted for a while, so you need versioning to be able to roll back to earlier version of the file, which is not common for the software supplied with the hard drives.
For some of them you have to start and monitor backup software, not all of them are fully automated.
Yes, you can do the backups yourself. When was the last time when you actually did it, honestly? And how consistently have you been doing it?
Backup software for external hard drives often stores everything in a proprietary format, not accessible for simple browsing, so you can never be sure that your backup is actually there.
Simple external hard drives do not allow you to have access to your data when you are away from your home or office.
Some software for external hard drives does not handle well situations when the drives become full. Or you have to figure out how to maintain and customize it.
Some software that comes with simple external hard drives can't backup open or locked files. Also such software usually backs up only entire files. For example if you have a lot of emails in Microsoft Outlook file and you received only a few emails today, such software will not update the backup with only the difference for today - it will save gigabytes of your huge Outlook files again and again.