Corrupt hard drives aren’t the worst that can happen. I recently lost my entire home computer to thieves. No work related stuff–but I lost my anime torrents, and I can’t find working seeds for some of them. (Some have since gone into R1 release, which means I can at least rent them, or even get them through Crunchyroll and pay for them for reduced guilt (Thanks, SDB!). Then there’s 4chan–you know, pictures of origami, cooking, weapons–four or five years worth, all gone.

Yeah, XCOPY is OK — but the best tool from MS is ROBOCOPY, one of the Resource Kit utilities. The current version even maintains all the permissions and security stuff (which used to be handled by yet another RK utility, SCOPY). RC has all sorts of options for retrying copies of intermittently bad files (such as, for instance, files being copied over a flaky network connection). In fact, the last time I fooled with it, you had to be careful to set retries to 2 or 3, instead of the default 1000. With the VERBOSE option, it creates a textfile log of each file and directory it attempts to copy, and what the outcome was.

Hard drives are so cheap now there is absolutely no excuse for not mirroring your drive. I just picked up a 750 GB Seagate Barracuda for $100, and a 500 GB for $80. (I should have gotten two 700s, but these were both one-day-only one-per-customer sales at Fry’s, and being an idiot, I didn’t think to just go to an ATM, take out $100, and go back. Sheesh.) The 500 is my new data drive (with a 170 GB bootable drive), and the 700 became my external backup drive after mounting it in a Firewire capable enclosure ($30, plus a $20 FW card). (And although USB is nominally faster than FW, apparently the FW protocol is more efficient.)

I just recently converted to Linux, so I’m still figuring out the best way to do drive mirroring. Of course, I really should be doing father-grandfather backups, so I need two external drives….but the fact is, I’ve only got about 200 GB of data, so I can partition the 700, and copy into alternate partitions. Close enough, and better than trying to choose only the stuff that will fit on a 70 GB tape, which was what I had before.

Beside, in another couple of years, 100 GB SD flash cards will cost $20, so I’ll be able to keep three-generation backups, and take quarterly permanent archives.

(Then there’s micro-SD flash, which puts 2 GB on a chip the size of a fingernail. Sweet Electra, where could you not hide one of these things? Data smuggling just became undetectable.)

There’s a simple registry hack that forces Windows to use a drive or partition other than C:\ for the Documents and Settings directory. It’s best done when setting up a new machine, but there’s a Profile utility that can move an existing profile on C: over to D:. That’s been useful more than once, because my experience is that C: fails more often than D:. Let me know if you want it, and I’ll dig out the procedure.

I just bought a wonderful little tool called a DriveWire. This is a USB dongle that plugs into any IDE or SATA drive. I love it, because it allows me to test all the suspect drives I have lying around without having to repeatedly turn my computer on and off, and without worrying about a bad drive blowing out my on-board IDE controller.

Finally, I also just discovered some utilities that monitor the so-called SMART tests built into almost all modern drives. SMART allows the drive to test itself, to report all kinds of internal conditions such as cumulative error counts and even temperature, and to log the last five errors it encountered. It looks to be a fabulous tool for predicting imminent drive failure, and I don’t understand why it’s not in wider use. I’m still trying to figure out if the Linux-compatible SMART utilities can work over USB connections, but I’m for damn sure going to start using it on my internal drives.

[Slightly edited for my purposes here.]