Memory cards are lower cost, easier to remove, and flash media is a lot more sturdy and resistant to shock and vibrations than hard drives, as well as not having any sort of mechanical wear like hard drives do. I've never had problems with losing memory cards, and if I did, I would solve that by having my saves spread over two memory cards in case of loss.

Now, on to the backup feature, are you seriously saying that making a 200 GB backup *every time* i want to back up a 1 MB save is fair? Played FF13 for 20 hours, made good progress, back up 200 GB. Next up, Assassin's Creed 2, got halfway, want to back up that save in case of loss, whoa, another 200 GB backup process! Do you have any idea how long it takes to back up 200 GB on a PS3 via USB? We're not exactly talking minutes.

With the ability to freely back up my saves whereever I wanted, this process would take exactly 30 seconds per save I wanted to back up. You're saying a 1-hour long backup process is a "fair solution"? That's 120 times as much time, plus the requirement of having an external hard drive, which is a much higher initial cost than an extra memory card is, or a USB flash drive. I have tons of USB flash drives that each would be able to back up all my saved games 10 times each, but I'm not allowed to because the games software-block me.

If there was a "back up saved game data" option on my PS3 in addition to "back up entire hard drive", I would be satisfied.