And optical discs are immune to failure? Of course it is prudent to backup critical data. But an optical disc isn’t anymore reliable than a harddrive. A single scratch can cause read failures, data loss, etc. I always backup my critical data (documents etc), on a backup harddrive, and some things online. I would never put my faith in a single optical disc. To me, that would be foolhardy.

For me, the chief problem with optical discs is read / write speed, and general inconvenience. 5 years may have been slightly optimistic, still, with the speed that technology is advancing by, it’s entirely beyond the realms of possibility.

Because when that 1TB hard drive fails, which *ALL* hard drives do at some point, you’re going to lose everything on it.

I recently bought a 160GB Western Digital drive, installed it, partitioned it into 100Gb and 60GB partitions and started using it. It worked great, so I started downloading large files to it. I had about 50GB of files on the 100GB partition and about 30GB of files that I was just storing on the 60GB one. After about 2-3 weeks, I had a brief power failure. It was only a few seconds, but it was long enough to shut my system off. When I turned it back on, Scandisk checked drive C:, which took an average amount of time (40GB), then it started scanning drive D:. This took about 20 minutes. It seemed to skip right over E:. After it finished booting, C: was fine, but D: had bee completely erased. The only thing left was a single, empty directory. E: had some of its contents scrambled, maybe 10GB worth, the rest seemed fine. So, a momentary loss of power resulted in my losing 60GB worth of files. The drive was fine, it just lost the contents.

You’re probable sitting there saying “That would never happen to me, I have a UPS!” Good for you! How well will that UPS work if you accidentally knock out the power cord? Or pull the wrong cord out of the outlet? Or hit the main power switch by accident?

Of course not every drive will do this (my Maxtor has never lost data because of a power failure), but it’s a possibility. Not to mention viruses, trojan horses, badly designed software (A demo of PowerDVD wiped out my entire “My Documents” direcory simply because I told it not to retain the settings).

I’ve always backed my files up to CD or DVD, but having 160GB of space to play with made me lazy. Now, I don’t leave anything unburned for long, unless I’m sure I can easily re-download it again.

I predict that this will not be the case unless flash memories can show up at the cost of 10-15cent/ 20/50 gb range. This is doubful but one never know.