[Shotimes] Re: OT: file recovery utilities

[Ian Fisher]

As always, I appreciate your insight Mark (still
trying to figure out what to do with that ticket in
Maryland!)

Are external USB HD's detected when booting to DOS or
a DOS shell? Do these only work with USB 2.0? It's
really time for an upgrade if I have to ask that. ;)

Ian


--- MonsieurBoo@aol.com wrote:

> 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
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