>just for the NIC. The consumer in my says "yes, definitely" but the geek
in
>me says "but you've already done all this work. and everything is working
>just fine! You idiot - leave it alone! Haven't you screwed up enough?"
Glad it all worked out for you. I've been wondering about that myself. My
life, is stored in a 180 MEG HD. Every single important piece of important
documents as well as live sets my buddies did are on it. I'm considering a
backup plan for this. I cannot afford to lose that drive
either. Recently, one of my drives went bad. Luckily it wasn't the data
drive.
SO after your experience what is your plan to ensure the data on that drive
is never at risk?
The main backup strategy is the RAID mirroring of the disks - it costs more,
but is so worth it. Lose a disk and don't lose any data. It really gives
you so much peace of mind (and disks are getting cheaper all the time). The
main problem is that there's no offsite backup (but how many home users
really ever do that?) - if there's a real disaster (fire or something) then
you've really lost everything.
Periodically I copy all the data to the external hard disk (that's the sole
reason I bought it). Very important data (like the family pics) are also
copied to DVD. I periodically makes copies of this stuff for the
grandparents anyway (so there is a kind of offsite back up). I copy the
big, but not irreplaceable stuff (CD and DVD rips, CD ISO images, etc) to
DVD less often mostly just because it tends to be huge (even on DVD I'd
still need a dozen or so for everything).
The mirroring has made me a little complacent: I've only been doing DVD
backups infrequently. At this point I would have actually lost about three
months worth of important data if I had lost the drive (the original post
exaggerated a little. for entertainment don't you know). Still - that would
have meant the baby's second birthday party, the Topsfield fair and a lot of
other things.
The big problem with mirroring is exactly what happened here: when you want
to rebuild your machine or change the array you need someplace to stow all
that data for the duration and then you're really vulnerable.
Jim Davis
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