On Mar 15, 2011, at 6:39 PM, Christoher Eliot wrote: > On Mar 14, 2011, at 7:26 PM, Lynne Rudié wrote: >> >> My recommendation is to buy more than one and keep redundant backups. > > Good idea: these days drives are much cheaper than data. > >> You don't really know when a drive is going to go bad, most of them >> last for quite a while but none of them last forever. I have 3 >> external drives sitting side by side on my desk. > > I would not leave them all side by side and especially not all > connected. That becomes a single point of failure; imagine a bucket > of water spilling on your desk wiping out your business. You would > be well off to keep one backup drive at home, one in the office and > one locked up, rotating weekly or monthly. I didn't mention that all three of my external drives are plugged in to a pretty hefty uninterruptible power supply. If I go away for more than a day (or two) I disconnect them and store them in different places. I work at home so taking one with me at night would involve putting it under my pillow and that's too weird even for me. But your point about having enough drives to rotate them is well taken. Next time I see a good sale I'll buy yet another drive that I won't keep connected all the time. Thanks for the suggestion. Lynne -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20110315/e3e5eded/attachment.html