I have found that hard drives are not as reliable as they used to be. 
Several years ago I lost my main drive and hadn't made a backup for several 
months. It was the main reason I stopped doing graphics for several years. 
Since then I have always had several copies of my data and always have a 
RAID 1 setup. Hard drives are so big these days and relatively inexpensive 
there really is no reason not to. On paper the chance of losing both disks 
is 0.25%, although realistically it is probably a little higher. It has been 
a nice setup, since I have had drives fail over the years and have been able 
to just replace the drive and mirror without any major downtime or hassle. I 
make a point to keep any non-essentials like programs and the OS on a 
different disk since these are most likely to frag a disk(yes, I use 
Windows). I guess that sounds a little paranoid...

Mike


"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.49644176e3858249fe60fc2c0@news.povray.org...
> Darn - one of my hard disks just suffered sudden death!
>
> Looks like something killed the electronics; it still spins up and all, 
> and the
> system recognizes that it's there, but it doesn't even disclose its model 
> name
> to the BIOS anymore.
>
> Fortunately it was "only" the brand-new Western Digital drive of my
> just-as-brand-new Linux machine, and not the main HD in my Windows 
> system... so
> the only thing lost are a few shell scripts, a few hours' worth of 
> rendering
> time on some standard scenes, and a small deal of installation and
> configuration work... plus a few minor updates to the radiosity tutorial I
> posted not long ago. Nothing that couldn't be reconstructed in a few 
> hours'
> time.
>
> If the same thing had happened to the - significantly older - main HD of 
> my
> Windows machine, it would have meant sayonara to something like a week of
> brain-wrecking radiosity thinking and coding...
>
> I just checked whether I was smart enough when setting up my project 
> versioning
> database: I was. If I should lose any single HD of my Windows system, I 
> might
> lose either recent work or the complete version history, but not both... 
> phew!
>
> Might also be a good occasion to dump the current versioning database to 
> CD-ROM.
>
>
> The nasty thing about it is that with the Linux system I lost my primary
> performance testbed for the radiosity code, so unless I get a replacement 
> soon
> this might slow progress.
>
>
>

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