On Saturday 09 February 2008, Frank Cox wrote: > If you're going to be removing that bearing weekly, I would be purchasing > the tool. And the original question was phrased as an ongoing operation, > not a one-shot. The original question, as Craig already stated, was ambiguous as to frequency of backup. In any case, if I were running an automotive shop where time is money I'll have a full case of the correct (and expensive) tools. But if I'm doing one or two rebuilds per decade at most, not only would it be a waste of money to buy the puller, I'm not going to likely be able to find it eight years later when I need it again. Now, lest you think I'm all duct tape and bailing wire, there are a few such tools I have had that I used in my previous employment, like a Delta OIB-1, and a Rohde and Shwarz spec-an. Don't need the OIB-1 anymore; it's gone to Sumter SC now, where it will be used. So's the spec-an. Those two tools together cost nearly $10k new, but I did enough 47CFR73.44 work to make them worthwhile for the short time I owned them. And I got a tidy sum back out of them when I sent them to their new home. Similarly, when it came time to spec out RAID arrays for storing one-of-a-kind historical astronomical photographic plates, the choice was clear. EMC ain't cheap, but it is good. But, for one-off copies of not so critical stuff, sure, I'd do up to maybe 100GB to DVD's. Beyond that, with 160GB USB drives like the Seagate FreeAgentGo running less than $100, the choice there is clear at least to me. For more critical stuff... well, actually, I've been there and done that for a radio station's entire audio library, but it was to CD and it took almost 400 of them to hold the roughly 250GB of audio (650MB archival quality CD's, stored in a media safe). This was done over a long period of time (my recollection is nine months or so), and was done by the board ops during 30 minute broadcasts during their airshifts. And this was on Windows, so it's OT for this list. It was also long enough ago that they've gone to hard drive copy since then; but the CD archive did get used once when one of the several 27GB Maxtors bit the dust and the music that had been on that drive had to be restored. Since we used high quality media, the restore went off without a hitch. This was a year or two after the backup had been written; those discs are long gone now, so don't know if they are still readable or not. I do have some Plextor media we got with the first 12x Plextor we bought that are still readable today. -- Lamar Owen www.pari.edu
