kjp

Well it's happened again.

Last year (almost exactly - hmmm, that's odd) in July my hard drive went stupid for no apparent reason. I got a second hard drive, and recovered most of the stuff from my broken hard drive. I reformatted the broken disk, and afterwards it seemed fine. So I have been using it as a backup disk. A script runs regularily (daily) that makes sure that the backup drive is synchronized with the main disk drive. Additionally, it has been the location of my web cache (which probably could be considered too big; cough).

Anyhow, yesterday it went stupid again. It was not recognised when the system started up. I turned the box off, took out the power and IDE cable, put them back in, and started the box up. The disk was recognised, but had errors, which Windows tried to correct. Windows started up, but was slow, and the first (of three) partition on the drive was marked as empty / "needs to be formatted". I've since been able to get some of the files off, but none of the file structure / file names.

The information doesn't really matter that much: it was mostly just backing up my primary hard drive. But it means that my confidence in it has reduced. So, I'm thinking of backup options. Hmmmm. CD burner looks like the go. Can get a basic burner for $60 or so (need to do more research / price hunting). This could be good, I think.

Probably the worst thing is that my web cache is no longer available. I had been using Smart Cache (now defunct with possible problems??). It was pretty good, I thought.. But I may try squid. hmmm.