Re: filmscanners: Best filmscanner, period!!! (strange title!)

["Anthony Atkielski" <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr>]

Ian writes:

> Wotta crusty old bastard.

Maybe, but you know, I spend a lot of time listening to friends and relatives
complain to me about their computers that crash for no reason and several times
a day, the mysterious error messages they see, the things that suddenly stop
working, and so on, and I never have any of these problems.  The reason is that
they are careless in their upgrades and changes, and do not consider their
systems mission-critical (and they aren't, for them), whereas I avoid upgrades
unless absolutely necessary and consider my system mission-critical (which it
is).  You can't have it both ways, and I prefer stability and reliability.

> I have a machine like that too. Experience has just
> about taught me that no upgrade is trivial and I'll
> spend many unbudgeted hours sorting out unexpected
> fallout ....

Yes.  In fact, I consider it the biggest problem with microcomputers today.

> FWIW Here's how I would approach this problem.
> I'd set things up so all my HDDs were dismountable
> in caddys. I'd run GHOST or something similar to
> give me a duplicate set to work with. I'd then
> remove the originals and put them someplace safe.

Sounds great, but all this costs a ton of money.  All I really wanted to
contemplate was changing to a slightly better scanner.

> Not an NT user, so I gather that can't be done.

I'd need to set up an identical configuration, and that's what I'd want to do in
any case, since I don't want to change anything else.

> I have three drives that I rotate through the
> caddy slot.

An excellent solution, one that I've considered myself, but I cannot currently
afford it.

> I've been bitten by tapes before - nothing
> beats a REAL HDD that you can plug into another
> machine and just have it go.

Yes, but tape is better than nothing, and I always run _verified_ backups, to
make sure the tape is readable.