> Sorry you had to learn this hard lesson.
Likewise, sorry to hear it - and the impact.
And though OT for this group - I'll share a couple
of thoughts on the topic.
PCI based IDE RAID adapters are quite cheap:
a nice Promise card can be had for US $50 to $75.
Typically with two IDE channels supporting four disks,
you could easily mirror two drives or four drives.
If a mirrored drive fails - you've lost nothing
(until the second drive fails).
Of course - hardware disk failures are not the only
thing that happens. Occasionally software goes
bizerk, the fingers don't press the right keys (oops!), etc.
RAID disk configurations don't protect you from
those kinds of situations.
As Jim AD1C notes - backups are invaluable.
Some months ago I picked up (at a CompUSA store)
a Western Digital external 200 GB disk that has
both USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces. With Windows XP,
just plug in the disk and backup your data ... fast.
You could also buy an inexpensive 100 GB to 200 GB
drive and put it in your system ... then use Windows
backup, Ghost or Acronis to make backups and even
image copies (sometimes compressed) to this on-line
backup medium.
I also picked up a fairly cheap DDS4 DAT tape drive
(actually at Dayton a couple of years ago) ...
and I perform more lengthy backups for longer term
archive to tape.
(The biggest problem is that I've got almost a terabyte
of disk space and about 60% utilized. Much of that is
JPG photography and some Adobe Premier projects ...)
I've encountered a few problems with using the
USB memory devices ... and only use that for
infrequent, small, non-critical file transfer.
Hope you find some success in your recovery efforts!
Bob W1QA
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