Hard drive construction.

[p2501]

my frakking IO Gigabank went all Bud Dwyer last night and offed it's self. taking with it, 400 gigs (or what i like to call ALL OF......) of music plus my entire archive of comics. so here we come to the point. I need either one highly reliable external drive or i'ma just build my own. suggestions, comments or advice?

[Mike70]

my frakking IO Gigabank went all Bud Dwyer last night and offed it's self. taking with it, 400 gigs (or what i like to call ALL OF......) of music plus my entire archive of comics. ugh. that's a shot in the 'nads for sure. i am not tech savy so all i can offer is a bit of friendly commiseration. sucks that happened.

[p2501]

ugh. that's a shot in the 'nads for sure. i am not tech savy so all i can offer is a bit of friendly commiseration. sucks that happened. thanks. the bitch of it is about a third of the music i'm probably not going to be able to replace, which is the real pisser. maybe this summer i'll hunt down and pacify the executive staff of I/O Magic... it's a thought.

[MinionZombie]

This is why really large hard-drives turn me off, there's so much more data to lose in one lump. You should have back-up hard-drives, I believe Neil does that. I also burn a lot to discs as well. I usually have at least 2 copies of stuff I wanna keep, sometimes 3.

[Danny]

all i can advise you is back up hard drives and partitioning.

[3pidemiC]

In my opinion, the best way to do it is have two internal hard drives (if possible). Use one as normal and load your operating system and programs and such onto it. One a week, copy over all of your important data (docs, music, movies, pictures, etc.) to the second drive. That way, if you ever get a spyware infection or your operating system is corrupted, you will already have all of your important stuff saved to another drive. Don't bother with programs, as those really can't be backed up. You could go external if you are planning on moving around with that data, but the transfer rate is going to be slower than if it was internal.

[Neil]

my frakking IO Gigabank went all Bud Dwyer last night and offed it's self. taking with it, 400 gigs (or what i like to call ALL OF......) of music plus my entire archive of comics. so here we come to the point. I need either one highly reliable external drive or i'ma just build my own. suggestions, comments or advice? No such thing... Anything is more or less likely to fail within some degree. With the price of 500gb drives, buy TWO! Back one up regularly to the other! Done! With my two PCs, each has an external USB drive sitting next to it, switched ONLY to backup, or put disposable data on them (ie: stuff I won't but wouldn't really care if I lost). I do backups every month or so to these external drives. I then have a 500gb USB drive which I pull out of an upstairs cupboard, and backup the two other USB drives to. So I have a copy of data on the PC, or their local USB drive, and another tucked away. The specific reason for the 500gb tucked away one is if I'm burgled, they'll probably take a PC and a nice USB drive next to it... At least I have another backup tucked away elsewhere in the house... Seriously, treat your data as if you might lose it tomorrow! You just might!

[MinionZombie]

Well said Neil. Data is precious as soon as it's lost. Like when I'm writing scripts or whatever, I have a copy on the computer and a copy on a floppy disk - hell yeah, old school son. Then I print off a copy, either at the end (for short scripts) or if it's a long script, at certain points as I go (like the end of each act). I did the same with my essays when I was at uni, I'd have at least two copies saved (one on rig, one on disk) and print whatever I had done after each writing session. Much better than losing the data and starting from scratch and losing writing gold, or just writing that was friggin' hard to get started on. Prior Planning Prevents a Piss Poor Performance. I too do a lot of backing up to an external HDD.