Thanks for all the advice so far. I never thought of working hard to keep the drives cool vs hot And using dd to avoid seeking is also a very good idea.
tar is a disaster however since it cannot handle directories down to files that are too long, even though the names are ok on file system. I used dump instead. I was smart, I made copies on two different drives. Gee, no new drive can ever fail! Click of death, click of death. :( Just in case anyone wants to know how I got into this multiple copies problem, I also had other stuff on other partitions, that was also a problem. I now do versioning on my programs, but I now see I should use git or another system to keep track of work in each country. Version 1.0.1 done in USA and version 1.0.1 in Guatemala are not the same! Duh. I have computers in the USA and Guatemala. I bus or cab to Mexico, fly to San Antonio and bus to Austin. I go both ways every month. I drag a few drives on my carry on but usually at least one stays put in both countries. So thats how this big mess got created. More ideas are welcome. I am learning a lot from these emails Thanks, Chris Bennett
