Ditto on the unix/linux thing.
If you have an external drive, you could also easily boot of a linux cd and tell it to backup one drive to the other. This, I know first hand.
I dont know directly if you can do the same using an openbox type setup, but I imagine it may be possible.
Disk and directory level backup utilities in linux are very mature, as well as being entirely open.
That leads to cool things like being able to take a backup from a disk that is already having hardware issues, which can result in a backup thats partially corrupt.
But because the resulting file is simply a disk image, you can mount the image and run disk repair tools on it to regenerate things.
This is something that would be extraordinarily difficult with proprietary files.
I had a drive that died on me, the first sectors were entirely
unreadable. Attempting to access the first few megs literally made
clanking sounds.
I was able to use that method to rebuild the missing meg and get every
single bit of my data back.
At the absolute least you could try to get some of your files back.
In the most extreme cases, you can even use open source computer *forensic software* to recover parts of a file.
This is especially true of text files, as their signature makes them stand out very well on a disk even if the header is corrupt.
If you have an external drive, you could also easily boot of a linux cd and tell it to backup one drive to the other. This, I know first hand.
I dont know directly if you can do the same using an openbox type setup, but I imagine it may be possible.
Disk and directory level backup utilities in linux are very mature, as well as being entirely open.
That leads to cool things like being able to take a backup from a disk that is already having hardware issues, which can result in a backup thats partially corrupt.
But because the resulting file is simply a disk image, you can mount the image and run disk repair tools on it to regenerate things.
This is something that would be extraordinarily difficult with proprietary files.
I had a drive that died on me, the first sectors were entirely
unreadable. Attempting to access the first few megs literally made
clanking sounds.
I was able to use that method to rebuild the missing meg and get every
single bit of my data back.
At the absolute least you could try to get some of your files back.
In the most extreme cases, you can even use open source computer *forensic software* to recover parts of a file.
This is especially true of text files, as their signature makes them stand out very well on a disk even if the header is corrupt.