<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">Thanks for the tips everyone! Lots of useful info. How I adore this email list. <br><br>I isolated the problem to be Suitcase Fusion gliche and the 2000 of the 3000 fonts it keeps trying to 'activate', or turn on for use, thus preventing Adobe programs from being able to launch due to overload of trying to access the crazy number of fonts. The boot drive still needed diagnostic tests and Disk Utility from the Install Disk was able to verify, repair, and fix the problems in a rather short amount of time without affecting any of the stray files I sync from my laptop to the desktop. I had never used it from the install disk. <br><br><span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;">Over reliance on external drives</span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> (and other removable media storage)</span><br style="font-weight: bold;">Funny story. I had
2 external hard drives. Different brands--Seagate Diamond internal converted into a maxtor enclosure for external backups and an external Lacie--different capacities, bought 5 months apart. They were purely used for backups and turned off when not in use. Both failed for different reasons, but within 2 weeks of each other. They were both plugged into a surge protector which was thread to a battery backup device. Both failures were hardware related even though they seemed unrelated to each other. I tried having the data recovered and it was not possible. The Lacie, when the enclosure was taken apart, I found out the components they really use. Aluminum foil is one of them. I was not impressed, and spent a lot of money to try to salvage what was on the drives with not even 1 file recovered. I later reasoned transferring large amounts of data in one sitting (sometimes I needed to do this on a daily basis, other times it was weekly) is taxing on external
drives (regardless of USB/Firewire/capacity/brand/Specs) and I believe this greatly shortened the lifespan since I knew less about external drives or hard drives in general compared to now. <br><br>I've had internal drive failure in the past as well, but at least I get a few years of use out of them instead of 6-12 months. Combined, I lost years and 400 GB of photos, design/art work, and archived files. These drives were purely used as backup. I never worked directly from the external drives to prevent problems. Just like it's not advised to work directly from a USB Flash/Jump drive. It's proven hard drives have a longer longevity as an internal vs external set up. I think the biggest factor is cooling and overheating because most external drives don't have a fan to cool them. I've also had too many bad disks, so I back up 2-3 of the same just on the assumption 1 of them will not work properly for whatever reason. The lower speeds last longer and are
more durable. However it means I have 500 DVDs (not going to count the CDs, ZIP, or cases of floppies I have not yet pulled files off of and disposed of).<br><br>I've managed to downsize from 8 to 2 boxes of peripherals, old drives, etc between then and now. I'm enough of a pack rat as stands. The drives I do still have is anyone's guess as to what OS is on them. I was considering investing in a consumer-end RAID (1? Striped) Bay--with internal cooling functions. Now I'm having second thoughts after reading what Jon mentioned. If you suggest a different alternative for the growth of a Home Office set up I'm open to ideas!<br><br>I'm now more informed about cloud computing... Jon's, Ray's, Chris's, Kristau's, Victoria's, and everyone else's tips really helped. :)<br><br>If there's a fire... well I guess I will find out how the titanium casing on the Mac Pro really holds up.... It survived without a scratch or any other abusive damages after a
tumble down a flight of stairs. I probably just jinxed myself.<br><br>I supppose the lesson at large is, nothing is full proof and living organism or not, most things have an expiration date where it is known or not.<br><br>--- On <b>Tue, 10/13/09, Victoria L. Herring <i><VLH@HerringLaw.com></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br></blockquote>From: Victoria L. Herring <VLH@HerringLaw.com><br>Subject: Re: [DM-MUG] Repair boot drive.<br>To: "Chris Kavanaugh" <chris@kavanaughgallery.com>, "Des Moines Mac Users Group" <dmmug@dmmug.org><br>Date: Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 12:02 PM<br><br><div class="plainMail">I don't want to spend your money for you, but depending on how much <br>you have on your boot drive, getting an external harddrive that large <br>plus 10-20% might not cost all that much and, in any event, may be <br>much safer than doing anything
involving maintenance.<br><br>A good idea, failing the need or ability to spend $, is to back up <br>what you treasure FREE to Mozy, Dropbox [I'll send you invites if you <br>want, as I get 'credit' for doing so], and SugarSync etc. up to 2G of <br>info = I just really believe that it's better to spend $$ to get a <br>backup just in case than to save money and wish you had done a <br>backup. If something goes wrong, all the $$$ in the world won't mean <br>a thing.<br><br>Microsoft/Sidekick fiasco comes to mind.<br>-- <br>Victoria L. Herring, Des Moines, Iowa. Blogs: <br><a href="http://blog.JourneyZing.com" target="_blank">http://blog.JourneyZing.com</a> [photography]; <br><a href="http://www.herringlaw.com" target="_blank">http://www.herringlaw.com</a> [civilrights/discrimination]; <br><a href="http://victorialherring.typepad.com/serendipity/" target="_blank">http://victorialherring.typepad.com/serendipity/</a>
[personal].<br></div></td></tr></table><br>