[quote name=\'tvwxman\' post=\'191897\' date=\'Jul 23 2008, 04:53 PM\']
THIS CAN HAPPEN?[/quote]
Yes. It's an electronic device. A mechanical, electronic device. Those do eventually fail. Hopefully later rather than sooner, but two months ago I had a 400GB drive that I'd had for a year and a half go belly-up on me. Fortunately with a little magic I was able to get most of the data off of it (and almost all of the really REALLY important stuff), but I damn well have a backup strategy in place now.
(Understand that in almost twenty years of PC computing that's only the second drive I've had die on me, but still.)
Holy smokes, I hadn't even realized that. You can't resusitate an external hard drive to get data off of it?
At great expense (we're talking four digits, usually), yes, a disk recovery facility will take the drive into a cleanroom, open it, take the platters out, install them into a working mechanism, close the thing up, and recover whatever data hasn't been destroyed when the mechanics died.
Or you can put together a good onsite or offsite backup strategy for a couple hundred bucks.
So, what's the option here...constantly keep back ups of back ups of back ups? It's not the video I'm concerned with here, it's photos and word files that have WAY more meaning to me than game show videos.
I don't think multiple backups are necessary. I believe Our Benevolent Moderator Matt said that any time he burns a DVD that he really really doesn't want to lose, he burns two and puts the second one away. Good idea.
If you're going to keep your life on a hard drive, it's a good idea to back up whatever data you deem to be Worth Keeping to a second drive...you could have both drives installed and just mirror the whole thing as you go (that's the RAID 1 thing mentioned above) or you can copy off what you need to at intervals (that's what I do...I basically have most of my user account folder dupe off to my second drive every night at 6:20). Or you can subscribe to a service where you can upload all of those files to a professional server (itself backed up out-the-ass) offsite, so that even if your house burns down (Glub forbid) you still have your data. For any other situation, it's extremely unlikely (though not impossible, see Surge, Power) that both drives are going to kick at the exact same time.
Photos and Word files, fortunately, compress beautifully, which means ultimately it would be a comparitively small amount of data to transfer, so I would bet one of the latter two solutions would work well for you.