Digital BW, The Print

> From: Bob Michaels [mailto:bob@...]
>
> let me second Clayton's suggestion for an external USB hard drive.
> They're cheap, fast, as big as you want and so convenient. I've yet to
> find the downside to them.

The greatest danger with any form of storage is that when you go to retrieve
data from it, it fails. This has occurred to me many times with CDs, burned
once, and then found unreadable a year or two later. The trouble is, the
only way to know if the storage medium sitting on a shelf is still good is
to try to read it, which hardly anyone (certainly not I) has the discipline
to do.

What I do is keep two copies of everything on two different internal hard
drives. In my case, I have several networked computers, so I keep them in
separate machines. But the point is that these disks are always spinning,
and the OS "touches" them regularly, so any gross failure of a drive is
discovered as soon as it happens, while there is still another copy of the
data. This sort of failure has happened to me a few times, but not since the
years when my entire collection of data was measured in gigabytes, not
hundreds of gigs. But I'm ready when it does, with 240GB in my main machine,
and 240GB in my backup machine.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...