From: "Aaron Reece : 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. a single anything is always a very risky idea!~ Still, I've had two drives to recover in the last year compared to many, many more CD's and DVD's and as someone who does data recovery I have found hard drives are almost always recoverable unless we're talking striped RAID, but we've had that discussion here before ;) : asked about any backups she might have. "Backups, you say?" Ouch. funny but true story, I had an email from someone who wrote that they hoped I could recover their data as they'd never made backups and someone stole their laptop. I asked where the data was located that she wanted recovered ..and never got a reply (!) : 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. As one can with hard drives these days too, they're nowhere near as tethered as they once were pre usb/firewire interface. : 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). USB and Firewire interfaces in portable drives are nothing more than IDE/USB interfaces that talk to IDE (PATA) and a few SATA drives, so there's no issues there.. SCSI removables are a bit more of a pain and a lot more expensive too. : How convenient will it be in 15 years to extract the contents of your : 300GB IDE HDD? (You did say "long term archiving.") a lot easier than trying to pull data from a 5 year old CD in my experience ;) 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. Those still run IDE drives inside so again, a simple and cheap IDE/USB interface like the one suggested can manage that easily, alternatively connecting to the parallel port is still a perfectly acceptable method. Fortunately IDE (parallel ATA) has remained a standard for a good period of time but if PATA redundency is of concern then moving to the newer SATA drives and using a USB PATA interface is a good solution. If USB or firewire were to go the way of the dodo I'd prefer to hook up to my soon to be replaced computer-with-usb/firewire one last time to drag 30,000+ images from a drive that's been spun for probably 40 hours to get stuff to the new drive, rather than running data recovery software across 400+ CD's or 60 DVD's (!!) : The ports may still be on new computers, but try : finding drivers for your OS to mount the drives. yanking the hard drive from the case and connecting into a newer usb/firewire case solves that pretty quickly! : Of course, HDDs offer great speed and convenience compared to optical : media, and the backup you made (or that can be fully automated) synchback is a good program for automated backups, but not effective if you're storing hard drives off site. : 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. Same with me, I ghost the hard drives once a month too, but over-write the HDD stored images and treat the DVD's as disposable. Annoying - I had used DVD RAM disks once to ghost and dropped the ghost images to DVD-R's for safe storage while I was away from the puters for a few months, but on this occasion I didn't copy to the remote hard drive for some weird reason. When I returned I had a memory issue which completely fouled the computer internal drives so I set to restoring the ghost image from the DVD-R's only to find 2 disks were completely stuffed. I count myself SO lucky that the final two images were still intact on the RAM disks :) : 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. Save yourself a heap of $$ and just *pull* the IDE drive from the firewire case and replace it with a fresh empty bare drive, then you can store the other bare drive safely and swap it into that case whenever you need to restore anything. at 30c US a gig, it's pretty cheap ;) karl
