Re: Maxtor external hard drive no longer recognized by My Computer

Today Sunny commented courteously on the subject at hand

I have Ghost configured to perform an incremental image
backup of my drive hourly to my file server, which runs
RAID 5. Once a week I backup the file server to tape, and
take the tapes to my cottage.

Hourly? Is this your home or work PC? I have a LAN but
hardly a reason or budget for RAID.

I work from home on contract. If my PC goes down, I earn
nothing until I resolve the problem. If I loose work I have
not yet delivered, I have to do it over to get paid.

My RAID 5 file server was not expensive. It's an older P3
system built into a tower case running used SCSI drives and
Linux. I got the SCSI RAID controller free with the drives
because it was busted - somebody had dropped it and knocked
a few surface mount components off the board. I fixed it,
then paid $150 on eBay for an identical controller as a
backup - but have not needed it yet.

If my PC fails, I loose no more than an hour's work. If my
house burns down, I loose no more than a week's work.

Then, your server and RAID complex must be elsewhere.
Guess my car picture hobby pales in comparison to the
importance of your work. <grin>

No, the server is in the basement behind my office. It's
just the backup tapes I take offsite.

Then, if your house with your office in it burns down, doesn't
the Fire Dept ruin your RAID by piling tens of thousands of
gallons of water on it?

I'd already considered and discarded the idea of storing my
external and optical on a shelf in my basement 4 feet off the
floor for this very reason, plus the distinct possiblity that
burning stuff will fall through the floor and land on my
plastic backups.

Recently my XP system bluescreened overnight, then froze on
mup.sys when I tried to reboot - this has never happened
before, system is usually solid. Rather than try to repair
it, I simply restored the 3am backup from the file server
(took 20 minutes) and got back to work. No problems since
:-)

BTW, I think what happens when data disappears is that you
"lose" it, unless you "loose" the bits somehow, so I'm
assuming I'm still falling for an April Fool joke here. <grin>

--
ATM, aka Jerry

"Whether You Think You CAN Or CAN'T, You're Right." ? Henry
Ford
.

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