[sdiy] Pseudopod setback.

[Ben Lincoln]

On Mon, April 20, 2009 8:08 am, Ian Smith wrote:

> I'm up to my fourth version of the schematic and the sixth version of the
> board. I'm still calming down from Vista corrupting my sound card drivers
> and reinstalling everything so I'll probably get to work again tomorrow.
>
> -Ian (needs an external hard drive) Smith

This is probably a bit excessive on my part, but with CD-Rs so cheap now,
what I do when I'm developing something is to literally burn the project
files to CD at the end of every day. If I'm working on the project on a
day off (IE I have the whole day to work on it), I will also make a CD if
I reach a significant milestone (first functionally-complete version,
etc.) in the middle of the day.
For larger volumes of data (photography, etc.) I do the same thing, but
with Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs. If you buy them by the spindle, they're less than
$1 each.
Because I do it regularly, and I'm only backing up files specific to the
project at hand, I know I'm backing up everything I need. When I've done
enormous backups prior to an OS reinstall, I've always missed something.
Once every couple of months, I take the backups over to my dad's house, so
in case there's a fire or whatever at mine I'm at least not starting from
scratch on anything.
I use a couple of external hard drives as extra working space and
intermediate archival storage, but I've had too many drives go bad to
trust them as an actual backup. One of the drives (or its enclosure)
actually died on me this past week, as if to illustrate the point. CD-Rs
and DVD-Rs aren't indestructible, but they're more durable than hard
drives or solid-state storage (at least assuming you buy quality media).
Also, even if they are damaged in some way, as far as I know it's a lot
easier to do a raw disc read and partial recovery with them as opposed to
a hard drive.