On 14-Sep-2010, at 06:42, Scott G. Lewis wrote: > > On Sep 14, 2010, at 3:53 AM, Paul Sargent wrote: > >> The question remains though, will whatever problem caused part of the disk >> to go bad cause other areas to go bad too? >> >> As you can't answer that I'd be getting another disk. > > I can't back that advice up enough. You either aren't putting important > things on that drive, in which case, why store them, or they are very > important and you're taking a chance over $100.
Oh, I'm not storing any IMPORTANT stuff on most of my drive space. The important stuff is backed up three of four places and adds up to maybe 500GB when you include all the photos, ALL the music I ripped and bought, and all my webstuff. If you remove music I have physical media for, we're talking maybe 150GB of actual critical data (40GB of photos, about 40GB of video, and about 60GB of music. The rest is documents, websites, ringtones I've made, and miscellaneous other stuff). Everything else is ephemera. I'd be ANNOYED if I lost it. I would not be SCREWED. And most of the ephemera is recorded video, which is already living on two machines anyway, or it's recorded video on its way to being h.264 files. Or the occasional 'gift' of overseas broadcasts I haven't gotten around to watching yet, or that I might want to see again. I mean, for example, I currently have 6 separate installs of World of Warcraft (a clean untouched current, a working used current, and the beta. and then a second set of all three for my son. Add in the download install files for those and we're well over 100GB. But if it all blows up I simply download it all again and I've back up and running in a few hours. Is it worth backing up that data? No, it is not. Yes, if it blows up it might be faster to pull it out of Time Machine that to re-download it, but the time lost is not significant enough to make backing up that data necessary. And all of that 150GB or so of critical data is backed up to 1) another drive on the machine 2) another drive on another machine 3) Time Machine. The only thing of any size on my machine that would be considered large and critical I haven't mentioned is the rsnapshot backups of my remote servers. THose take up about 800GB and growing (400GBx2), but they are the tertiary and quaternary backups for those servers (two different drives on my local machine after the two backups done on the servers themselves). I do expect that my video will grow significantly with the iPhone 4. Small enough to always have with you and excellent video quality. > At home, with my cheap $100 to $200 SATA drives connected to a server I built > myself, with backup policies which are obviously far better than most > non-techies and far less than perfect, I take no chances. It's like what they > tell you with car seats... get in an accident, throw the car seat away. Maybe > it looks okay, who knows. To be honest, for $150, is it worth it? Depends on the backup strategy… -- It was long ago and it was far away / And it was so much better than it is today _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
