| I work in desktop computer technical support for a large university as my "day job." I always tell my users, based on a decade of experience, that hard drive failure is not a question of "if," it is a question of "when." I've seen enough of these go south that I do not trust anything truly important or irreplaceable to a single hard drive. The most recent one happened two weeks ago - the professor in question had just finished typing up a whole semester's worth of lectures. After determining that the HDD electronics were ruined, I asked about any backups she might have. "Backups, you say?" Ouch. One of the biggest advantages of removable media such as CD and DVD is the fact that you can get the storage medium physically separated from your computer. So multiple backups can be made and stored in multiple (off-site) locations. It's highly unlikely that your house and your office or place of work will catch fire the same night. One more thing to ponder before throwing out your optical media writer is the changing nature of HDD interfaces. While the IDE and SCSI (physical) interfaces have remained reasonably constant, SATA, USB, and FireWire interfaces have arrived within the past few years to unseat them as technology continues its inexorable march of progress (he writes with an uncharacteristically low level of irony). How convenient will it be in 15 years to extract the contents of your 300GB IDE HDD? (You did say "long term archiving.") To get some idea, try finding a service today that will extract the contents of a MFM/RLL drive. Try finding someone who even knows what that is. Or how about the parallel port drives that were popular in the days before USB and FireWire. The ports may still be on new computers, but try finding drivers for your OS to mount the drives. Of course, HDDs offer great speed and convenience compared to optical media, and the backup you made (or that can be fully automated) is better than the one you never get around to, so personally I use both, a weekly HDD backup to a FireWire HDD and a monthly (if I can get around to it) backup on DVD-R media. If I had a slightly larger budget for digital photography I would probably just buy another FireWire HDD and keep it in my office in case of fire or other catastrophe. For now the DVD-Rs are working fine. I apologize for this long and rambling post on a wholly un- aesthetics-related topic. -Aaron Reece Oswego, NY, USA On Aug 29, 2006, at 9:41 PM, karl shah-jenner wrote:
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