On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:35:18 +0100, ss wrote:

On 14/07/2018 14:50, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Franly investng time and effort to read an onbsolete drive more than
once, to get the data off, is not in my list of cool hip ways to spend
my life


Agree with you about faffing around with obsolete stuff, but the *one*
argument for having a backup drive not permanently connected is that it
saves you from nasty ransomeware that quietly scrambles all your FATs.

Sorry but that's at least twice you've made this misleading statement
about ransomware scrambling FATs. It's not the FS metadata that gets
scrambled, it's the data stored by targeted file types that gets
encrypted with a 1024 bit (or larger) encryption key regardless of the FS
type.

For example, all that's needed for a NAS disk volume's contents to be
vulnerable to such ransomware, regardless of the FS used by the NAS box,
is that it be mapped read/write to a drive letter on an infected MS
windows client machine.


I already have a 20GB external hard drive which I just update a few
times a year, mostly pictures and a few excel stuff. Purely a back up
should my PC fail, it is not permanently connected.

Whilst a 20GB drive is laughably small by today's standards (what with
the sweet spot price point now around the 6TB mark), only connecting it
up to perform backup/restore operations a few times a year is an
effective way to minimise the risk of its contents getting encrypted by
ransomware. Note the use of the phrase, "minimise the risk". However,
assuming reasonable vigilance, it's an effective strategy (a vigilant
user would be extremely unlucky to be hit by a ransomware attack just
when they'd randomly attached their backup drive for another session but
sometimes, "**** (just) Happens"(tm F.Gump)).

--
Johnny B Good