<div dir="ltr">So, I was going to let myself be sucked into Ron and dev null's debate on the other thread, but decided better of it. While I am no Steve Gibson fan (in fact, I believe his products and advice are only slightly better than snake oil) I'm going to steer clear of that and head for the central topic: there are a *lot* of threads on this mailing list about drives failing; and no, I'm not suggesting there's an epidemic of drive deaths, just that people are approaching it the wrong way.<div>
<br></div><div>If you care (aside from replacement time and cost) about a single hard drive (rotational or SSD) failing: you are doing it wrong. Plain and simple.</div><div><br></div><div>Backups are the solution to hard drive failures, not ddrescue, spinrite, or snake oil. Pick any one hard drive in my place and destroy it. Other than buying and installing a new hard drive, I won't lose much sleep over that. I might lose a little bit of data, but not enough that I'll be struggling with ddrescue over it.</div>
<div><br></div><div>JD and I once did a presentation at ALE-NW about backup solutions. There are many out there: commercial and open source, local and remote, network or disk-to-disk, etc. Pick one (or be like me and pick several) and use them. Then enjoy the zen of treating hard drives as the commodities they are, as opposed to the heart of your electronic world.</div>
<div><br></div><div>(FYI, this all comes from a couple of painful experiences before I was enlightened to the path of the backup.)<br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br>David Tomaschik<br>OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B<br><a href="http://systemoverlord.com" target="_blank">http://systemoverlord.com</a><br>
<a href="mailto:david@systemoverlord.com" target="_blank">david@systemoverlord.com</a>
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