Mad Maxtor strikes! Or more seasoned wisdom on backups.

Congratulations Tim on your new Maxtor hard drive. I got mine for my birthday last January and it's been a little rip snorter until about 3 weeks ago when my laptop started saying things like "This drive is unformatted. Do you want to format it?" and then I'd click No and then decide to investigate the problem ... but maybe later.

Now this behaviour occurred once some months back, and a simple concurrent power cycling of laptop and drive lead to a resynchronisation of their mutual existence and all was well, so I really wasn't too concerned this time. I was just putting off doing a bit of wriggling about down behind my workstation to find the right wires to unplug things (a far more reliable way of really turning things Off these days than using the Off button which usually only turns off the power light and nothing more).

So yesterday I finally did the wriggling about and discovered that power cycling wasn't solving the problem. I did all the usual google searches for a solution, which mostly documented my problem accurately followed by replies like "you can reformat the disk but you've lost your data" together with some unsavoury words about the manufacturer, their mother, and so forth. So that's where I'm at. One reformatted disk, all lost data, and the one-touch backup still isn't working, although I can invoke it OK from the software.

Now fortunately the loss of my backups isn't tragic as my laptop is alive and well so it isn't as if I am trying to recover anything. But I did keep copies of a lot of data CDs on my external hard drive and I am now trying to find that "safe place" I put those CDs after I loaded them on so I can reload them. They must be somewhere in this house ... but where ...

The Maxtor WWW site attempted a guilt trip on me by suggesting that the most likely cause of such a problem was failing to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" function before disconnecting the drive. Would I (a professional IT person) have ever done such a stupid thing? Hmm, yeah, well, I do it all the time actually. That's the problem with laptops, you like to move them about and so disconnecting them from all those printers, external drives, USB hubs at the workstation is a common task, and who wants to be bothered with the Safely Remove Hardware thingy every time?

So, there's probably a moral to this story and I'll be more diligent with the Safely Remove Hardware thingy in the future I guess.

The other moral of the story is that maybe I should not have neglected making more permanent backups than doing hard drive duplicates onto an external hard drive. Indeed, it would appear that I have not bothered to burn a CD for backup purposes since I got my Maxtor external drive. But the problem is that burning CDs for backup purposes is time consuming as it needs a few CDs to hold the most valuable data (and I don't usually bother with the less valuable data).

So I am now out shopping for an external DVD burner. My problem is that my laptop only has USB1 not USB2 so I need a DVD burner which can use my FireWire connection instead which is a limiting factor. But I think a LaCie DVD burner I saw today at Harris Technology looks like it might be the go, 8.4G per DVD using the double layer burning.

It also has this LightScribe ability to use the laser to burn a greyscale image on the reverse of the DVD to serve as a label (instead of writing on it with a pen like I normally do or sticking on a printed label). Admittedly I don't really need to have impressive labels for backup DVDs, but it sounds pretty neat and, if it works as well as they say, it will be Fun To Show Off With, which is probably even more important than being a mature IT professional who knows how to have a good backup strategy like Dr Mansfield.

Like Cindi Lauper says, when the working day is done, grrrrls just want to have fun!