I gots me some Fat 32 drives. Some of thegym I put in XP machine, copy to other blank so I have info in NTFS. When really important I also copy into a Lunix HD. Park in a fire proof safe and I’m good to go … Silly ain’t it? If you are ‘anal’ like me, invest in a 4 o 2 ‘mobile’ trays and then all the swapping is easy peasey…
Manny peoples give away almost new 6-40 GIG 5400 RPM HD’s. I got drawers full of them, even 7200 RPM in the 20-40 GIG range. Labeled up and ready for the end of the world… Got yer format right here. Bring it on…
Of course my ‘stuff’ is not important. I have 5000+ slides I can’t get anyone to look at.
I gots lots of picture albums of when I was little, my kids were little, and my parents were little. They are only good for running off visitors and relatives when I bring them out to look at. No one wants my “stuff”…
Heck, the genealogy folks don’t even want it. Why do I save 10 gazillion pictures that not even I go back at look at.
Read my old emails? Bawahahahaha
If I had a business, well, would be tuther story but … I think is all a plot by the manafactures to sell more hardware.
No one really cares about anyones personal “stuff” IMNSHO.
Cap’n J., you seem to collect the strangest ideas! Where do you get these?
In my personal usage of probably 5000 CDs and DVDs over 10 years, I have yet to find or see one with a distorted hub. Even if you cut a notch in the hub, I doubt if it would affect the spinning or reading of the data.
Just doing a quick check with some DVD commercial cases vs. standard slimlines, the commercial black boxes seem to grip the disc more strongly than the slimlines, the reverse of your claim. Of course, YMMV, but I have to ask, got cite?
Is there a safe way to do this on a laptop? Obviously I can’t wipe the hard drive and see if I can restore (if it fails, then what?) and a spare 2.5" drive would be expensive.
That looks too geek for most people, although it is right at home on my desks, where I never put covers on computer cases since I’m always adding or subtracting stuff from the inside.
But the internal drive bus cables have severe limitations on practical length – a few feet at best – and an internal drive sitting in the open is vulnerable to damage that a case is designed to prevent, both physical and electrical. If I leave a drive anywhere exposed or unbolted, at least I put it on a thick piece of cardboard to prevent accidental shorts in the circuit area below.
The mobile racks I’m fond of are a good compromise in removability vs. safety. It’s even easier to plug in a racked drive module than connect cables to a separate drive.
Since your HD will eventually fail anyway, why not get a replacement before that happens and use it for a test?
You could try renaming some files and restoring just a few, but that won’t test the system restore.
When I get a new drive, I buy 3. One to use, and 2 for backup. That allows rotating them, and over a few years, each gets used only about a third of the time, so they tend to last pretty long.
Why 3, not 2? Because if you accidentally do a backup in reverse you will wipe out the drive you were trying to save! In that case, you have at least one unit that was not affected and one more chance to get it right. And there’s nothing like replacing a bad drive with the one you were counting on to work and find it’s NG, too.
Sounds expensive? To sound like an insurance man, “Can you afford not to?”
Scr4, If you disconnect an external drive in the middle of a write, what happens? Ever tried it? Is there any built-in protection against this?
Because in all likelyhood, the HD will last until my I upgrade to a new laptop. I’ve bought a new laptop every 2 years or so for the past 15 years and haven’t had a hard drive failure on any of them.
I don’t know, why do you ask? I don’t think I’ve done it. In theory you can lose data or corrupt the hard drive but I suspect it’s unlikely.
I asked because one of the reasons you gave for using an external drive is " I want to be able to connect/disconnect the hard drive without having to shut down the computer." But it doesn’t mean you can connect/disconnect with total disregard to what’s happening. Personally, I’d rather be safe than sorry; shutting down the system is very secure. Anything else, not so much.
I never said you could. You should close all applications that are accessing the drive, and then unmount (“safely remove”) the drive. But that’s much less disruptive to my work than closing all applications (some of which may be doing calculations, playing back a podcast, burning a DVD-R, etc) and shutting down the system.
As a minimum restore a handful of important files to some scratch directory, to make sure your restore procedure works AND your files are indeed accessible.