Tony B wrote:
Hard drives can and do fail suddenly and without warning. But your backup
strategy seems to consist entirely of adding more hard drives! This is
certainly incorrect, but you don't need to wait for blu-ray; use DVDs like
the rest of us do.
Please forgive me for this reply, I am certainly not trying to get the
"last word" in an argument.
The reason that I reply is to point out that as data multiplies over
time the usual advisable backup practices become obsolete. Using DVDs
is maybe no longer a good option.
I have backed up my internal bootable drive C: and my internal data
drive F: (I earlier wrote that the F: drive was used as a backup of C:,
but when reformatting and restoring I find that this has not been true
for several years since there was not enough space on F: to backup C:).
The backup media for all internal drives is external hard drives; the
external hard drives contain VERY much additional data that I can't back up.
Were I to try to back up 1.3 terabytes of data (less, say, about 300 GB
of backup on the external drives) onto single-sided DVDs, it would
require about 215 DVDs. Double-sided DVDs, maybe 114 DVDs. This is way
too many DVDs to back up with any frequency or for any reasonable cost.
My backup problem may affect few today, but I think that it will become
more common as hard drives expand their capacity and people use their
computer in greater ways. At present, I think that very large SATA hard
drives of 1 Terrabyte (does Windows XP support these?) or BluRay disks
are the only options for large data size backups. Are there other options?
At this point I know that you all don't need to know more, so you don't
need to read below the following in which I say what kind of computing
that I do that requires such large disk storage.
==================== Read only if you're interested!
My PC at home has 4 profiles: Me, my wife, and two daughters.
==== Me:
1. I am involved with engineering design and signal processing. Some
of these require large data bases as well as large data storage. This
must be kept until the end of a contract.
2. I also do much video processing, audio processing, photo processing,
and complicated graphics design including flash animations. These are
more than 500 GB.
3. I do both musical composition and web design.
4. My work does not supply me with the best software or hardware for
all of the above (and more things needed),so that I do most of my work
at home on my PC. This means that I have purchased a large number of
software for the purpose needed.
==== Wife:
She does photo processing and graphics design. Getting into video
processing.
==== Daughter 1
She does video processing, graphics processing, photo processing, and
gaming.
==== Daughter 2
She is a stage manager, who makes graphics designs and does lengthy
video presentations.
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