Friday, March 06, 2009

On paranoia data backups and a kaput hard disk

I have a paranoid attitude to backing up my data. It's something I always used to have, even to the extent where in the old days I'd make tape copies of my original music tapes in case my cassette player chewed them up. In the digital age this paranoia has only increased.

The back up routine means I have: 2 external hard drive backups done monthly, copies of my backups on the schools external hard drives and a full dvd copy set done every six months.

This is a good thing. Because last night one of the external drives just gave up the ghost. No power at all. Faulty power supply by the looks of things. But it's obviously cheaper to buy new than repair. The only problem is that I only have about 40Gb of data to backup, including my music. In the past this meant buying 120 or 160Gb drives. But now the smallest I can get is 250Gb. I was in PC World tonight looking at the shelves and wondering what sort of person buys a 1Tb drive. Surely they must be using it to store music, movies and the photo library of several small countries. But in that case they must have at least two of them? Because I sure as hell wouldn't trust a single copy backup of anything now.

Like I say; paranoid.
But I do have a nice, new, shiny 250Gb portable drive. Ideal for taking on holiday with me. well, you never know what might happen.

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