Re: Backup

["biltroop@xxxxxxxx" biltroop@xxxxxxxx]

have regarded built-in hard drives strictly as the home of OSes and apps.< That's typical of all of us old enough to remember who extremely unreliable real hard drives were in the past. But for several years, they have been both so reliable, fast and cheap that they are themselves becoming their own best backup option. Granted, these days I waste a lot of storage space that way. But PCs come and PCs go, apps come and apps go. I can and do use my cartridge drive with any scsi PC. If, like me, Norman Bauman used a unix email client on our ISP's server and didn't decode attachments in downloaded email, he too could yawn at most viral epidemics. Although I do copy some data files to PC hdd for what I regard as unreliable backup, backing up a whole PC hdd never crosses my mind. ≪ These removable cartridges are not at all the same thing as an external HD. ≫ >(almost as sad as XyQuest's, but the Dave Erickson of Syquest founded Castlewood),< I think you give the SyQuest guy too much credit. His entire business model is based on the principle that HD manufacturers have previous generation platters they have to get rid of cheap. He buys them up and turns them into SyQuests, Jaz's, Orbs, whatever. But these platters never have the essential protection that a real hard drive, which is practically a miniature clean room, has. I have tested dozens of these drives over the years, and have never once received one I would recommend. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Mail2Web - Check your email from the web at http://www.mail2web.com/ .