SRS -

The crumbled external drive was very much unexpected, and was apparently what the reliability guys call an "early failure." The thing that was really surprising is that "modern" machines have pretty good diagnostics built in - or installed as software "managers" - and I got no warning. The first symptom was a bunch of files that just wouldn't copy back from the drive.

I managed to reformat, but the switch from FAT32 to NTFS defaulted to about 120GB instead of the original 160GB. (It's a cluster size default, and I didn't bother to partition.) About two days later the drive started making noises, and within a couple of hours it just quit completely. Probably scraped enough loose media off the platters to lock the heads(?).

When my "art collection" and "her" genealogical files (lots of large photo scans) outgrew the small CD rack beside the machine, I made myself a 10-drawer "Art cabinet" that will hold about 140 CDs per drawer - with 3 larger drawers in the base for a few prints; but I'm about to the point of having to throw old backup CDs away to make room for the fresh ones. Backups do often include a lot of "redundancy" so a full set of every "working" file I've got in archives probably would fit on about 100 CDs; but there's all that sorting that would have to be done to get a "one copy of each file" set.

One of the reasons for getting the drive that failed was to have room to make mass file copies from backup CDs to consolidate archives. Theoretically, if you copy the same file, you'll overwrite and automatically eliminate some of the duplication, but only if the file names are exactly the same and the folder layout is the same. Of course, if you overwrite, you're only saving the last copy you copied back to the disk. That's one of the problems with CD data backups - because the CD folder name rules are different than hard drive rules, so the burner program renames stuff, often truncating the name for the same file differently every time you burn a new backup that includes the file.

Data DVDs have the same problem with filenames, and I've not found them useful because it's an unworkable (extremely slow) process getting a few data files back from them. Like tape, you need enough free HD space to restore entire backups so that you can get the specific individual files from the HD. Of course with tape, if you make a new sort, you can re-use the tape for the "reorganized" backup. With CDs/DVDs you just get a lot of coasters and Xmas reflectors.

Windows supposedly has a decent "backup" utility, that would let you put stuff on CDs you could hide in the basement; but some highly publicized incidents where they gave very specific instructions about how to back up stuff when migrating to new versions leave me a little dubious. In one such incident they admitted that they'd thoroughly tested the backup instructions and they worked perfectly - but nobody at Mickey's place ever checked whether you could restore anything from the backups. In this case you couldn't.

One of the major storage equipment makers ran an ad about 20 years ago for "the perfect backup device." They called it the "WOM" - for "Write-Only Memory." The ad claimed "you can send everything you've got to it, and it'll never get full." They reported that they got something like 20,000 inquiries from people wanting to order it, several of whom came back and requested they be put on the list to be notified when it was available - after they were told it didn't really exist. (It was an April 1 issue of the magazine where it ran, and the picture in the ad was obviously a chunk of 2x4, painted black, with the "input-only" cable tied in a bow to an eye-bolt in one end.) Lots of people make backups that resemble that device.

John