[Shotimes] Re: OT: file recovery utilities
MonsieurBoo@aol.com
MonsieurBoo@aol.com
Sat, 9 Jul 2005 15:08:54 EDT
Ian: "It started off as a backup drive but grew so much that I turned it
into an archive drive. I was playing the odds; I figure that I upgrade every
few years and hopefully the drive would still be around for me to transfer the
data off of it to a newer drive. Unfortunately this one died prematurely.
I'm thinking of getting an external USB HD as well as a new internal IDE. The
USB would be a backup ..."
Yep, "archiving in place" is the slick way to go. For the past 5-6 years
I've just removed my old HD after copying everything I needed off it to the new
one, put it in an anti-static bag, ziplocked it and stuck it in the closet.
Now that's a REAL archive drive because it doesn't run until you need it to
recover data, so it should last virtually forever.
The cost is already amortized from using it as my online drive. Compare
that to the cost of CDs/DVDs and the mammoth time investment required to back up
a big modern HD to those media, though with something 40Gb or less, I
suppose that's still a viable option.
But, with internal HDs you still have to worry about whether a PC ten years
from now would have a backwards-compatible internal HD interface and power
connection where you could still remount and use today's drives. We'll still
have USB interfaces (or retro cards) ten years off because they are
multi-device standards, not just dedicated for HDs. And all it takes to "archive" USB
HDs is to just unplug 'em and set 'em on the shelf.
Besides, CompUSA sells enclosures that you can drop your old (or new)
internal HD into and turn it into a USB drive. About $40 for the enclosure and it
currently pays for itself by virtue of the price difference between a bare
internal HD and the same sized USB version. I just did that with a new "last
year's model" 250Gb drive for total $120. For archiving multimedia files so
my main drive only has a handful onboard at any given time, and it only runs
for as long as I need to transfer files to or from.
PS - the file recovery utilities DO require a second HD to recover the files
to. As long as the damaged drive still can physically spin up, they do a
doggone good job too.
Cheers,
Mark LaBarre
94 atx 130k