My first choice to back up a whole hard drive is another one just like it. For backing up user created files, if it fits in your pocket, it's good. If two fit it's better. Yes, those with purses, briefcases and backpacks have more options. But, I've never left my pocket in a taxi. Ordinarily, my life is pretty ordinary.
I've found CDR's are good for great for backing up CDR's, punch cards are good back-ups for punch cards, etc. If I could get my hands on it, I tired it. Full disclosure here, I haven't used blue-ray or multi layer anything. My biggest disappointment was a set of system restore DVD's that could not be read on the same laptop that made them.
But dear, oh dear. How can a hard drive have a MTBF of a million hours, which is 114 years and 56 days plus almost 16 hours? Could it be in the marketing department's virtual reality, maybe? In your world or mine, no I don't thnk so. Since the time between failures implies more than one failure, I have to ask if anyone has ever had their dead HD heal itself or gone out and had it fixed? Now maybe that explains why MTBF is soooo long. I don't understand why anyone cares if MTBF is 14 or 114 years. For me, it's mean time to first failure that counts. I think that's more like 3-4 years and that's why you better be backing up often unless you can afford to loose it all every 3-4 years, on average.
Does anybody out there have a drive that's lasted 14 years? Have you upgraded it to Windows 98 yet or is it still running DOS 6.22? The former question could be a Topic of the Week for future newsletters. The latter could be an appropriate topic around the first of April.
As some of you have already guessed, I've been retired for a few years. But I'm still curious, and I'm seriously curious about what type of data is out there, data that could be restored to a hard drive, data that might become invalid if part of it is transferred from the source at one speed and part of it at another? Please post a response here. I'll check back after the weather.

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