RE: [APML] OT: External Hard Drives for Archiving data

["Craig McIntyre" <craigmcintyre@optushome.com.au>]

 

> Another concern I'd have about 
>   a hard drive, no matter what the size, is it's still "all your eggs in one 
>   basket"...any drive can still fail, and while recovery can often be done it's 
>   inconvenient and may not be complete.  Now I burn the CD's, do a quick 
>   read of the files for verification, and that's it.
>

This is very true. I have a separate hard drive mounted in a removeable caddy for backups. Up until recently I was pretty lazy with it and rarely took it out of the computer. That was until windoze decided that my data really wasn't all that important and corrupted the partition table. Result = goodbye data on both the main hard drive and the backup too. Luckily I was able to recover the one and most important partition through various linux utilities.

 

So if you're going to use a hard drive as a backup medium, ALWAYS keep it separate from the computer until such times as you actually need to do the backing up. Also burn cds for your most valuable data. This will help prevent data loss just in case you get a double whamy of drive failures.

 

Craig.