Measures to protect external hard drive?

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Motivating story: I have a 1.5 TB external hard drive that I use mainly for backups and for virtual machines. Last night I was testing a program on a virtual workstation residing on said external drive. When I connected a USB flash drive to my VM it crashed, an $MFT error appeared regarding my external drive and ChkDsk said the problem was unrecoverable.

In the end all I had to do was turn the drive off and on, but I've had similar situations that required reformatting the drive.

Situation: The contents of the drive are not crucial, but I would rather not reinstall and reconfigure my virtual machines, and losing old backups is never good. Obviously making backups of my backup drive makes no sense, and it would take too long and too much space anyway. Any recovery software that would need to first copy an image or contents of the 1.5 TB drive to another location would not be feasible.

Questions:

Other than making a backup of the drive's Mbr (with MbrFix), what else can I do?

Is there software to backup MFT or or system files that sometimes become corrupted?

Any other ideas or programs that can fix corrupted external hard drives?

 

You need to back up to more than one physical location, otherwise it's not really a backup at all. If your one physical back up location fails, your other physical back up is there to bail you out.

 

It's a fairly new drive, and I don't think the drive is at fault because I replicated the problem several times (don't ask)... More commonly this type of problem (with more serious consequences) occurs on occasion if you pull off an external hard drive without 'ejecting safely,' or the "pull off" occurs because the computer crashes or experiences a power outage. Point is it happens. Actually, that's not the point - the real point is whether there's anything you can do ahead of time to improve the chances of recovery if it does happen?

 

Ideally yes and I think that's good advice, but even if I have backups at various other locations I still want to know if there's anything I can do in advance to prepare to fix any particular one of them in case of this type of error (short of reformatting)?

 

For important jobs i have same files on 3 different ext. harddrives.
So i never connect these drives at the same time to my computer,in case a power failure can destroy them all and you end up with nothing left.