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Showing posts from June, 2007

How Not To Backup a Hard Drive

A story of age-related mental degeneration. My daughter's computer CPU fan failed, and I had to lend her a spare PC. She was feeling a bit down in the dumps because of exams, but mostly because her mobile phone screen had also failed. So I decided to copy all her iTunes music to her temporary PC to cheer her up. I took her HD out, and connected it up to another spare PC with the idea of first backing everything up to an external HD, and then copying the music from the backup. Obviously, being an experienced PC whiz, I didn't go so far as to fasten the HD into the drive cage; I just left it sitting on top of the cage. But like a complete idiot, instead of placing it upside down so that the only thing in contact with the cage was the HD casing, I left it right way up so that the cage was in contact with the unprotected control board. By the time I had put the flames out the control board was toast, and tests confirmed that it no longer functioned. I came up with the idea that t