>separate platter of its own within the hard drive, is my date safe in >the event of a bad crash? In other words, does a hard disk crash >affect ALL the platters in a hard drive, and if not, then it's safe >to use a hard drive as its own backup to forgo buying a separate CD >or Zip drive?
If you drop it and have a bad head crash then likely the drive won't spin up right etc and all the data will be potentially difficult to recover. If you have other partitions and the drive does still spin up then partitions that don't include the crashed area could be OK if the drive spins up etc. If you have 2 partitions on the drive and you have some filesystem corruption on one partition the other partition will likely remain completely untouched. On old drives with bad sectors I've mapped out the bad spot into a partition of it's own and then just never used it; this is ancient history though as far as drives are concerned (back when SCSI and MFM both existed, just about :) Bad spots on a drive can "creep", too, and get larger. You won't be able to use a CD-R conveniently on anything older than a 3400 (SCSI manager 4.3 necessary, older PB's don't have this) so if that's what you mean by CD I think that won't be a useful option. 1400/9.1 can burn data (Toast 5.02) for me at 1x but many things don't work (like progress indicators) so you can't tell if it's working or hung up and it takes forever. I don't think Toast would even run on a 190, but would complain about hardware limitations. I've not tried it though. Zips can work but are not archival quality, IMO zip disks are fine for temporary storage or transportation but I would never trust one with important archived data. Not data that I wanted to be sure of using in case of a crisis, anyway. A second SCSI HD in an external case would be my recommended option, recall though that most drives are meant to have about a 5 yr operational lifetime (although many exceed that) my opinion is to start being aware that a drive might just "go away" sometime after 5 or 6 years of use and trust it accordingly. HTH. B -- PowerBooks is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PowerBooks list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/powerbooks.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:powerbooks@;mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:powerbooks-off@;mail.maclaunch.com> For digest mode, email: <mailto:powerbooks-digest@;mail.maclaunch.com> Subscription questions: <mailto:listmom@;lowendmac.com> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/powerbooks%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
