Hi Everyone, I had 6 external hard drives averaging 60 gb, and one by one they have died. I deliberately bought them with a fairly small capacity dividing them into 3 pairs having identical data and figuring that, if, one died , I wouldn't be losing all my data. If I had put all my data onto one or two large capacity drives, I would have lost a lot more data-or so I thought. (Hope you get my logic here!) I never figured most of then would die within a few weeks of each other! Some of then died in pairs! I didn't even keep them plugged in as I didn't want any viruses getting to them.
I found this article which says that is quite common. http://www.computercraft.com/docs/externalharddrive.shtml. Wished I'd have known that before.
Fortunately, I had backed up most of the data onto DVDs but still lost a lot of irreplaceable information. Plus I hate the time consuming DVD burning thing and then hunting them up when I wanted to replace data onto computer.My question is whether I would be better getting several thumb drives as they seem more stable to me, though the larger capacity ones are just too expensive right know. This seems like a lot of hassle and I have found articles which disagree and say that external hard drives are more stable than flash drives.
I have heard of tape back up but wonder if it's easy to use and if the software is expensive. I have had a quick look on Ebay and some of the units don't seem that expensive, especially second hand.
What would I look for when buying a tape drive? Or is there some better method to save my files? My operating system is Windows XP pro.
Thanks so much-Kerry
