At Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:39:21 -0400 Jim Diamond <zsd@...> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 22:17 (-0800), Ardell Faul wrote:
>
>> For what it's worth, I see a lot of failed hard drives in the laptop
>> repair business, and my experience has been that the drives most prone
>> to fail are the ones over 100Gbyte. In fact, I don't think I have ever
>> had to replace a drive in the 40 to 80 Gbyte range. And almost without
>> exception, the drives I see in laptops almost never have anything like
>> even 40 gbytes of data in them. Anybody who downloads and carrys around
>> 160 Gbytes worth of important data in a laptop is being foolish. Very
>> foolish. They are just asking for it, and they usually get it. I don't
>> understand why anybody would even WANT to put a very large hard drive in
>> a laptop. If you want to collect a lot of music or video, an external
>> backup drive or a desktop drive is a much more sane choice. It is just
>> plain stupid to carry around a laptop with a lot of data stored in the
>> hard drive. One slip of the hand, or a good solid thump under the area
>> where the hard drive is, and you can kiss all your data goodbye.
>
>> I guess it is the Geek Squad blurb, you know--put in a 160 Gbyte hard
>> drive, 2 gigs of memory, and flash the BIOS and you will have a
>> screaming machine.
>
>> What a bunch of shit that is.
>
> Your reply is neither helpful nor well-thought out. Just because
> someone has a large drive in their laptop does not mean that they
> don't have it backed up somewhere, so your assumption that they will
> lose all their data if their disk goes kaput is just silly.
>
> Second, Kris didn't say his data is important.
>
> Third, the point of having a laptop is mobility. There is no point in
> having a laptop if you have to carry around your desktop or external
> drives to get at your data.
>
> Or maybe I'm just a foolish person, like almost everyone I know who
> uses their laptop as their primary computing platform.

I agree. At home every morning I do a backup (dump) from the laptop to
a desktop and via the internet to New York University, where I teach.
Those days when I go to work, I do an additional backup to NYU and often
a third to both sites when I come home. All these are performed
partition to partition on the laptop in single user mode and then the
directory containing the dumps is rsync'ed to the desktop(s) in
multiuser mode. Plus I have a cron job that does an rsync of the
live filesystem.

I find it very convenient to have all my data with me at both sites.

allan