John C. wrote: > I have two hard drives, and use a surge protector. The > newest/biggest hard drive is for work and the older/smaller one is > for experiments with different distributions and more pertinently > for my two backup partitions. Overnight my work files (/usr/local > and /home ) are backed up to partitions on drive number 2. > > About every three years I buy a still newer and bigger drive. The > oldest drive is retired, the remaining drive is demoted to backup > duty and the newest is now the daily work drive. I buy hardware > from Tiger Direct. > > I have a mid-tower computer and I run Linux primarily. With a > laptop and/or MSWin things get more complicated. > > I only lose files through gross stupidity. No hard drive failures > since I went on a three-year rotation. Hardware is cheap, data is > (or are) expensive.
This sounds like an excellent plan. I feel compelled to point out, however, that ANY drive can fail at ANY time without warning. And that means exactly what it says. A 2-day-old drive can fail (early death). A 1-year-old drive can fail. And of course, the older a drive is the more likely it is to fail, although I'm sure there are 10-year-old drives that are still going strong (though so slow and small that I wonder why anyone would use one). We all need to keep this in mind and be sure that anything we'd hate to lose is backed up at least to the point that we wouldn't jump off a cliff if we lost the work we'd done since our last backup. Sometimes this may mean copying to a flash drive or another physical drive in the system as we work. I also suggest using an uninterruptible power supply instead of a surge protector. UPSes are now much less expensive than they used to be. If you lose power, a UPS will keep your computer going until you can do an orderly shutdown. This is a further protection from corrupted files. Also, many UPSes condition power and protect from sags as well as spikes. Fluctuating power can be damaging to computers. If you're generally around when power might fail, you don't need a UPS with as much runtime off the battery as you'd get with a more expensive unit. Most UPSes have outlets for both battery-protected and just surge-protected power. You'd plug things that must be running (computer and monitor) into the battery-protected outlets and noncritical stuff (e.g., speakers, inkjet printer) into the other outlets. I don't plug laser printers into a UPS that's also protecting a computer because laser printers (mine, anyway) demand a lot of power when they're working and sometimes when they're not and you don't want to drain the UPS battery unnecessarily. May we all never lose data! --Judy Miner Vermont, USA Registered Linux User #397786
