Desktop backup opinions needed

Hi all;

For many years I've always had two desktops in the house. Each would backup the critical data of the other. I've never lost anything irreplaceable with this method, even though I had terrible surges and lightning strikes.

Now that the g/f is gone I have a single desktop. So I'm a little worried about a catastrophe taking out my machine and data.

I have two hdds, an 80gb and a 120gb. I have an external DVD burner. I was thinking to put the DVD burner into the desktop and mount my 120gb drive in the external housing. I guess I'd have to store my dvdrom from the desktop as I need the bay for the dvd burner. I would connect the 120gb when I needed to backup everything and disconnect it when done. In that fashion my data couldn't get killed if my machine died or suffered a huge surge.

Or maybe I should just buy an external housing and mount the 120gb in it and leave the external burner alone?

I thought about backing everything to DVDs but that's so time consuming. I don't want to bother with tape drives, I've done that in the past and it was a pain.

Which route would you take? Buy an external housing for the 120gb or move drives around like I indicated?

Go for an external HD kit... put the burner in the CPunit. if for some reason it does not fit here is a link for one.
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3778426?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
or something of the sort.....

Edited by Yoldering 2005-11-25 9:59 PM

FYI the last time I thought I lost everything on my computer due to a electrical thunderstorm, I asked me dad what to do b/c I had no back up. He told me to remove the hard drive, put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer over night, then install it into my other computer that I was not using, and pull everything off of it that I needed. I was able to pull stuff of for almost 2.5 hours. I froze it again and was able to get a little more off of it. This does not work in every circumstance but it does work...

Is there a scientific reason of why freezing a hard drive would do that?

And why would an electrical thunderstorm mess up the hard drive? Magnetic field? I would expect that to just require a format to fix the hard drive...

Maybe the chip itself was damaged?

Please tell.

The HD was OK and did require a format, but was still a little screwy, but I had to get the info off of the HD before the format. I don't know the exact reason it works but here are some examples. http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-5029761-2.html

If I were to guess, I'd say that sections of the hard disk were overheated briefly from a power surge, affecting the integrity of the disk, and that freezing them may have re-integrated the disk material before the disintegration could progress further.

I'd guess that if I had a clue what I'm talking about.

You know, years ago I think I bought a 20 mb hard drive for somewhere in the order of $500-$600. Today I can buy a 200 gb hard drive for around $80 with rebates. That makes it super affordable, and reasonable to have a clone of my primary drive in my desktop.

And that is what I have. I have an internal 200 gb hard drive partitioned into a 50 gb partition that contains my os files and my main programs, and I have a 150 gb partition that I do all my work on, such as graphics and word processing, and whatever. I chose to do it that way so that I would minimize my chances of fragmentation errors and whatever.

But my second 200 gb hd is simply a clone of my working one, and I think the external enclosure for it was only $20 or so. I sleep easy at night knowing that even with a direct lightning strike, my backup (which I do not leave connected) contains everything I would need for recovery.

Best of all, I've finally trained myself to do routine backups every 2-3 weeks...which was really the hardest thing for me to do.

Rich

Ok, it seems that the bearings on the heads are messed up, and the head doesn't have room to move, or something similar. Freezing shrinks the metal slightly, temporarily fixing the problem.