At 1:36 PM +0000 1/10/06, Stroller wrote: >On 9 Jan 2006, at 23:39, Philip J Robar wrote: >> >>.... Even though hard disk failures are so rare that most consumers >>will never see one... I have to agree with Stroller (whose post I deleted): hard drive failures are ALL too common. Not at ALL something most consumers will never see. At least in my experience. I myself in my family have had three in the last 20 years, and I buy only IBM/Hitachi and Seagate drives. That may not sound like much but ONE hard drive failure, if it's your main drive and it's not recently backed up, not even in the last week or so, is pretty catastropic. My last failure was during a full backup to an external so I lost both backup and main drive. The one before that was my main drive during use. One minute it was working. The next minute it was misbehaving. The next minute it was gone. Back up, back up to multiple drives, and NEVER assume it can't happen to you! It isn't common but it isn't rare, either. I now keep two backups of each of my two internal drives. Daly