Monday 28 September 2009

80 into 800 won't go

I recently tried to back up the contents of an 80 GB hard drive to a single 800 MB CD

My first work PC was a 3270-PC. It had a 10 megabyte hard disk drive which took me
nearly a year to fill up.

My first home computer was a PS/2 Model 80.
It ran at 25Mhz, with 4MB main memory in order to suppport OS/2 Extended Edition
and a 100 MB hard disk drive.
At half price it still cost over 4 gran, 20 years ago.

Recently, I purchased a second portable USB hard drive since I was worried my
first one (80 GB) was behaving strangely. As my disk space was limited
I thought it would be a good idea to backup to CD the contents of the drive
before moving files about.

Without thinking I just tried to drag the contents of the drive to the CD writer
and then kept wondering why it stopped copying files at just over 2.75 GB
having written nothing to the CD.
Then I did the maths

I should have stopped and taken a rest there and then.
Realising that saving to CD was not going to be possible I hunted for
spare disk space on another drive.

Well to cut a long story short, one drive looks very much like any other in Windows
(D:, E:, etc), so what actually happened was that I deleted ALL copies of some directories
from ALL of the drives.
And I didn't have a CD backup!

Before I do anything else I'm going to backup everything to my brand new 1TB Seagate external drive

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