I just wanted to announce that I defraged my D drive and my drive lock up on me...  Now I have to take it to a recovery center...   where my drive will become a recovering hard drive...  All my stuff was in there...   one GB is too little 100GB is not enough...  

sympathies with you.... smirk...

re: CDs/DVDs - burn early and often. There's 2 kind of users; those who have lost a hard drive (been dere, done dat) , and those who are going to. Hope they get everything back.

I got a 300g and a 160g....and that's still not enough! 
Get well soon!

Thank you for the sympathy....   : > )

aw tom! you didnt save ANYthing?

Grrr... I hate digital storage!!! There is no Full Proof, method.

That was my storage disk....   Never again will I defrag a storage disk...

I just bought another 500GB external HD, to back-up my back-up.
Burn everything to DVDs from time to time too.
Might be overkill, but I had a fatal drive crash before and lost everything

It's DVD's for me.

**dvlenk6: ** Might be overkill, but I had a fatal drive crash before and lost everything
I thought "everything" was a link to something.....  I kept on cliking....  but,,,,   anyway...  I'm out of my tree tonight...  my cheese fell of my cracker...

I hear you I must make DVD's...  and  you are not overkilling anything with 500GB!..     we all need to back up....  they're selling Terra bite drives..

This is how I carry out my DVD-R Backups and its a bit of an overkill but I have a good reason and will explain later.

1. I Use WinRar to compress the data into Multiple Chunks of 15MB or 50MB files, it depends on the Data.  Using "Solid Archive" at this point will also give you more compression.

2. I than Select my Rar Compressed files than use QuickPar  to generate Parity files, these is a method of redundancy like RAID Systems on a server.  I usualy leave the default settings but if I notice that the recovery files are a bit on the low side I will manually bump it up.

3. Finaly I select my Rared Files and Parity Files and a tool called QuickSFV to generate file verification file.

4. Now since there will always be  a small bit of room left on each DVD, I create a folder called Tools and I include Winrar, QuickPar, QuickSFV and if there is enough diskspace even DVD Burning program.

5. Finaly I burn the entire thing onto a DVD-R.  Now if I have time, during the burning process I select the "Verify" option after the burn so that the Burned Data is compared to the data on the hard drive.

Ok here is an explanation of this excercise.

Why WinRar?? Why not? But Seriously, You can fit more data on a DVD-R by Compressing the data rather than simply burning it.  Depending on the data you can get savings of 30%-70% or more space.

 Whats with with QuickPar Parity and QuickSFV File Verification?? and Verifying after a burn?  Well I dont have time to Verify each DVD-R that I Burn, and although the DVD-R Burning software may report that the Burn was ok... I have run into discs that were actually bad!!.

So a quick method is to use QuickSFV.  After you burn you're disc, you can run the QuickSFV Verifiation and it will check and report back if youre data is good.

Than why do I need QuickPar parity files?? Well lets say you made a backup and delete you're files off you're hard drive and sometime in the future, you needed these files back... What if the DVD got scratched? or worse the original burn had flaws?  Well you can Recover the data from the DVD-R using the Parity files.

I speak from experience, this happend to me.  What I thought was a perfectly good burned DVD was infact faulty.  But thanks to QuickPar I was able to restore my data.

As I've mentioned before.  I hate Digital Data!! of any kind.

Manufacturers are quick to sell 500GIG and now 1 TerraByte Drives, but no good backup solution.

Another Method of backup is to simply buy an external drive and backup you're data there.  and keep the external drive in a safe place.

Keep this in mind with Hard drives... its not a question of if it will fail... but rather when it will fail.  ALL Hard Drives eventually fail, they are mechanical in nature.

Large capacity Flash Drives is whats coming in the future, we can already see this in New Laptops without hard drives.  But than again Flash Drives have a LifeSpan too, after 100,000+ Read/Writes they fail as well.

As well as DVDs, think RAID 0! when a drive dies, your data is backed up on others in the array. plug in the new one and use the raid tools to initiate the replacement. Voila safer data for the cost of a few hard drives ( so 4 160G HDs are going to cost you around £120 if you shop carefully..... (less for you lucky folks in the states) may sound a lot but very useful hardware config.....

All man-made things fail. Like Analog-X, I've had some interesting experience with CD's that were supposed to have code, and they do, but I can't get to them. They aren't scratched... they were burned with some other software I no longer use, but the media was never "locked"... that is.. never closed for other software to access it. So it's an open disk ready to be written to by the original software.

Fortunately when it comes to CD's, I believe in redundancy. There's going to be one or two other CD's with the data somewhere on it. What I do with my Bryce stuff is keep a bunch of CD's, now DVD's, with all the stuff on it. I manually verify the burn. The original data is then moved to another hard drive on my network. There's at least two network drives where the data exists.

Now that I have so many projects, I've begun to zip all the Br5 files. The Br6 tend to be compressed already. I leave the jpg of the projects untouched so I can see what the zip's are without having to open them.

What I don't have is a good indexing system. When I need to find what's on a DVD.... I have to look into the DVD.

D@M: you're right, all man made things will fail sooner or later..  The more moving parts the sooner

Saving data comes in a lot of flavours..  But since Im not running a business off my art (not yet anyway),  I care not to go too over board in saving it from explosions, hurricanes, Just in case events and other local out of my control events...  lol

I think DVDs are really a great way to save stuff for at least 8 to 10 years if I'm lucky...   DVD's are not forever either as you may know....  but you wind up with hundreds of DVDs after a while that need condensing every once in a while...  Thousands of images some good some awful...  

eventually you'll loose a lot of them...