[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