LordEden

I've seen disk rot (I didn't know that was what it was called) on CDs before, but those were ones I burned with my 1x SCSI burner I got from a friend after he upgraded to his ultra fast 4x back about 13 years ago. I still have some CDs I've burned from that time period that work, most don't. I think it has something to do with the quality of the CD/DVD, I used cheap CDs back in the day.

I wonder about external hard drives ever sense I had a girl come in with her external HD that had died on her. She was a senior in college that had kept all of her final projects on this HD (some of which where huge flash projects) and when she plugged it into the PC, it smoked a bit, then died. I ripped it out of the casing and tried plugging it directly into a pc. Nothing. Nothing under linux either. I watched a bit of smoke come off of the circuit board as power ran through it. I am kind of leary of external HDs after that.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but arn't most external HDs just casing around a normal HD or have they advanced more than that? Couldn't you just buy a few 1TB HDs and back up everything then store the drives in a safe place? Best of both worlds?

I like Lucifer's idea the best. If I was to want to back up TBs of data (which I'm getting to that stage now), I would buy (or trade, haggle, scrape together) a motherboard with RAID capability and build me a server. Buy a few TB hds and make RAID array (which RAID type you want to use is up to you and what the MB is capable of) then use it as a media server. Surge protection + UPS and you have instant access to all of your data. If you run out of room, add more HDs. Getto, but it would work.

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Vice-President of the CinnamonGirl Fan Club - The Meat of the Zombiesquirrel and CinnamonGirl Sandwich