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

[AMaroney@sptimes.com]

> 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.

All mechanical devices will fail, given enough time.  Mirroring drives 
will help against localized mechanical failure (the drive), but a 
lightning hit or evil software may still clobber both drives (in a simple 
mirror).  Drives are like the stock market  - only keep on a drive what 
you can afford to loose.

There was an interesting a article couple of years ago  (Scientific 
America I believe) that said that the media usually outlives the readers. 
For instance I have many 8" hard sectored floppy disks, but no system with 
a drive to read them.  Some day CDs will go away in favor of holographic 
memory cubes (or something).   Ironically, the most durable archive medium 
in the computer era is hard copy - we can still read 30 year old 
printouts, but try to find a wire memory reader.


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