Hi,
> I have a 180 gig LaCie Firewire drive. I've used it throughout the
> last year at school. It's always been cranky. I should have seen the
> signs. The thing sat there grinding away forever tonight when I
> turned it on and when it was done the drive was completely blank
> except for a few corrupted files from one folder. I should have had
> it all backed up, but I didn't. I just lost a *lot* of important stuff.
I'm sorry for you. Despite all the discussions here about external
drives being the most reliable, I'm losing my faith in them. I have a
small 2.5" one that is very practical because it's so small. But after
a few months of use, the file system gets corrupted. I hardly move it
around. But from discussions about the NextoCF backup device, I learned
that Windows doesn't shut down the drive properly: when I unplug it from
USB, the drive needs to do an emergency shutdown (which includes yanking
the heads to a safe position with a strong spring). After experiencing
file system problems for the second time now, I wouldn't be surprised if
Windows doesn't clean up after itself on the software side, either.
Despite the claims that it's "now safe to remove the drive".
Back up, back up, back up, preferably on two separate external drives.
Then, copy your backups to your hard drive from time to time, format the
external drive and copy it back.
Peter.
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|