>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is 
>> that such a sensible idea?
>>
>> (Then again, I don't have any hard data on the reliability of HD 
>> verses tape verses CD. I've heard that spinning HD up and down wears 
>> it out faster than keeping it spinning, but I don't know if that's 
>> true...)
> 
> As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media.  Trust them 
> way less than hard drives.

Depends. We have a batch of archive CDs which have all gone unreadable. 
We have other, much older CDs (like ten years older) which are still 
readable to this day. Seems to depend on how cheap the disks are.

> As I said, I *hope* it's just the enclosure that croaked, and the drive 
> itself is just fine.
> 
> If it's not...I dunno.  Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't 
> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at 
> the moment.  How time-critical are these kinds of things?  Can I just 
> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data 
> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?

If it's a mechanical fault, every single time you try to turn the thing 
on, you could be doing more damange and destroying more data.

If it's just an electrical fault, it's probably not time-critical at 
all. (Although I imagine getting replacement parts gets harder - but 
then depends on how long ago the drive was manufactured, not how long 
ago it failed.)

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