[Ham-Computers] Question

[WA5CAB at cs.com]

Don,

The short answer is no.  There is no way to store anything such that nothing 
can destroy it.  However, there are degrees of safety.  In general, the 
greater the distance between the current data and the backup copy, the better.  But 
before going further, by definition a backup is a current or slightly out of 
date copy of current information.  By which I mean that if you copy something 
to some backup location and then delete the original, the backup ceases to be 
the backup and becomes the original.  Which is a totally different situation.

So by definition, if you are storing a backup somewhere, and lose the backup, 
it only matters if you also lose the original.  Of the three scenarios you've 
listed, the first one only protected you against a corrupted copy of the 
original.  When the drive failed, you lost both the backup and the original.  But 
the 2nd and 3rd scenarios should have been only a minor aggrevation in time 
and money.  You didn't lose anything except the cost and time to replace the 
second drive or replace the external drive and recreate the backup from the 
original and otherwise so what.  Slightly less aggrevation than if the drive with 
the original on it had been the one to fail but otherwise no significant 
difference.

As a comment on philosophy, if you live in an area where you could be forced 
to evacuate on short notice, the external backup drive is probably the better 
choice, as long as you don't drop it and destroy it.    Our current situation 
with internal backup drives means that if we had had to bug out back in 
September, I would have had to either take the entire machine or spend an hour or 
more removing drives.  Before next hurricane season I plan to fix that problem, 
probably with a dedicated network drive box Linksys has just come out with.



In a message dated 11/7/2008 7:30:52 PM Central Standard Time, 
wxfreqrs at cableone.net writes: 
> G'Day All
> I have a back up storage problem
> Background
> years ago i stored stuff on the same system disk as the os, well i had a 
> hard drive crash lost it all
> them i put in a second Hard drive and back up everything on it, no os just 
> data storage
> it crashed after a few years
> so then i bought a usb external hard drive
> DISASTER i dropped it and cannot access it
> data recovery services might be able to help i don't know
> 
> IS there any way to safe store data that i wont lose it other than a hard 
> copy of everything
> 

Robert & Susan Downs - Houston
wa5cab dot com (Web Store)
MVPA 9480
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