[Leica] Computer help!!!

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

One conclusion is obvious: stop buying Maxtor drives. Another conclusion is 
that there might be something wrong with your electric power, humidity, 
dust, or temperature. Disks like the same kind of climate that you do.

It is not plausible that an external hard drive will "show up" but have no 
files on it. I'd take those disks to a responsible computer store and ask 
them to have a look-see. This is not a job for amateurs computer people.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It makes one "disk" 
out of many disks. Sort of the opposite of a partition. There are lots of 
kinds of RAID; some give faster response, some are more reliable, etc. RAID 
is a waste of money for backup. Its intended purpose is to make you not need 
to DO backup.

I use only Seagate disks, and I never buy the newest or the biggest. My 
current fixation is on Seagate Barracuda ST3400832A-RL disks, which are ATA 
and not SATA, but they are cheap and reliable. I have 12 of them. I make 
backups in rotation, 1-12, and when I fill disk 12, I erase disk 1 and start 
the rotation over again.

NEVER back up on an internal hard drive. Use USB or FireWire, always. Or put 
the disks in another box.

I recommend against leaving the hard drive connected to the computer when 
you are not backing up.

I do backups via Ethernet to a server down the hall. The server runs 
Retrospect; it reaches out to the client computers and grabs their files and 
saves them. You can also run Retrospect on the computer being backed up, and 
have it direct its output to a server. But if you don't have Ethernet, this 
isn't an option for you.