Re: off-topic: c: drive filling up

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Judith Davidsen wrote:

> The problem is that these images fill up what's left of my
> C:drive.

It seems like you have already received quite a bit of good
advice on this. My view is that offline storage is important --
for a variety of reasons -- even if you have a large hard drive
(or more than one). A CD burner is nearly a necessity these
days, and particularly so if you have no other backup means at
your disposal. CDs do not offer huge capacity, but they are the
most standard data storage format commonly in use today that
offers a reasonably good capacity. The drives are not expensive,
and the media is cheap. It's about the best we have, until the
day DVD burners become sufficiently fast, affordable, and in
common use.

There are some other (proprietary) options out there, like the
Castlewood Orb drive (said to be better than the Iomega JAZ
drives), with higher capacities.

I use Zipdisks, DAT tape, and CD-R for different purposes, and
with some degree of storage overlap or redundancy. Really big
things, like partition images that would span a couple CDs, work
best on tape. I choose to back up several Zip disks onto a CD-R
(with the most important CDs themselves being duped), which gives
you some idea which I consider the more durable medium. (Even a
CD might only be good for 2 - 10 years, but by then we'll
probably be onto some other storage technology. This will
outlast use of the OS + app.s involved, in many cases, and quite
possibly the usefulness of the data as well.)

Jordan