On 17/07/2018 15:23, Andrew wrote:
On 17/07/2018 10:21, pamela wrote:
On 12:59Â* 16 Jul 2018, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 15/07/18 20:27, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:35:18 +0100, ss wrote:

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

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

Â*Â*
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.

Â*Â* Sorry but that's at least twice you've made this misleading
Â*Â* 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.

Â*Â* For example, all that's needed for a NAS disk volume's contents
Â*Â* 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.

Â*Â* Whilst a 20GB drive is laughably small by today's standards
Â*Â* (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)).


Interestingly I am safe from ransom ware purely by an accident of
design - apart from running Desktop Linux anyway.

And this may be of interest to windows users.

All my important data is on a server. That runs Linux.. It happens
to export that data via NFS, because I have no windows or MAC
clients, but it could export it via Samba and so make it available
to Windows and MAC users.

It backs that data up on a timed script to a second disk that is
not visible either to NFS or SAMBA

Unless corruption happened and I didn't notice BEFORE the backup,
I always have a 'last nights snapshot' available.

Even then if I thought a scrambled disk was a possibility I would
create a file called do.not.touch.me and test to see if it had
changed and not do a backup unless I found out why.

Having a Linux based twin disk server instead of NAS is handy

I use a really old PC. With a LOT of disks

Is that PC so old that it uses PATA with Molex power connector?

Would such a really old PC have difficulty powering many disks?


My PC still has Molex power connectors but the power supply is
450 watts which is fine for my needs. Circa 2006, though with a
new M/B in 2011.

The brand new 650W supply I bought a couple of weeks ago has numerous
Molex connectors - still needed for additional case fans, a somewhat
elderly DVD writer and a totally unnecessary case light.

SteveW