OT: Re: [AT] Backing up tractor pictures and degenerating into a ramble.

[Mike Sloane]

Floppies are about the worst media to keep any kind of data on. I went 
through several boxes of old floppies from the late 90s recently. These 
were stored upright in closed boxes and were mostly name brand, but some 
reclaimed by doing full formats. The results were that about 10% of the 
diskettes were OK, but 90% had errors of some kind or another. 
Fortunately, there was nothing important on any of them - mostly files 
downloaded from "bulletin boards" (remember them?).

The only way to ensure that any magnetic media is sound is to 
periodically read the data off and write it back again, and very few of 
us want to go through that task. That includes Zip disks, Jazz disks, as 
well as hard drives and thumb drives. I recently tried out a handful of 
older small hard drives that I had marked "OK" before setting aside, and 
only 2 of the dozen or so were any good.

I have yet to have any optical media fail.

Mike

DAVIESW739 at aol.com wrote:
> I have all my finances on quicken I have it  backed up on floppy and the hard 
> drive and also at the Quicken web site when i  had some trouble last summer I 
> with quicken and tried to reload my data I really  screwed things up I found 
> my floppies were not up to date and that I scrambled  my hard drive backup and 
> then like an idiot i uploaded instead of  downloaded  my stuff on the Quicken 
> site. I guess one cannot have to many  ways to save important data. I spent 
> all summer inputting data from the paper  backup. Good thing the wife keeps 
> that where I can't mess with it. maybe one of  those little drives would be some 
> help in my situation as I keep a running  backup at all times. 
> I have XP but the backup part only backs up programs  not the data stored by 
> them.
> 
> Walt Davies

> 

-- 
Mike Sloane
Allamuchy NJ
mikesloane at verizon.net
Images: <www.fotki.com/mikesloane>

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, 
and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -Gore Vidal 
(1925- )


-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.6.13 - Release Date: 01/16/2005