Well, first off Shaun, the one touch drives are USB *externals* with their own separate enclosure, so its not going to "overheat" from being in the case with the other drives. Second, While hard drive failures are sometimes common, I have had one SD card die on me, *while unplugged and in a protective case*. So badly in fact that it won't even reformat. So, I am not sure that is *safe* either. I also have at least one CD, which contained a lot of MP3s, which was stored, in case, someplace cool and dark, which either a) never burned right to start with, or b) died, which I can now only recover about 10% of the songs from. All in all, we simply don't know what the viability of DVDs/CDs/Blueray are *yet*, portable ones *should be* ok, but there are no guarantees there either, and tape (if you can afford it) or another hard drive is "still" the safest media to store your backups on, for decent cost.
That said, the other issue is scripts. The only "native" ones for Windows are jscript and VBscript, and both of those royally suck when trying to do anything too complex, not to mention that, unlike a decent backup utility, you couldn't install them as a service, or other system, on Windows, which could access all user accounts and do a complete backup, or even a backup of critical data from multiple users. The newest One Touches won't do that either, and that is why their software is total junk (well, that and the fact that they can't compress data, so your "backup" drive has to be bigger than your main one, and FSM help you if you have multiple drives you need to back up... Also, on some systems, you might not have access to cscript, or what ever the other one is, which are the "command line" script systems for those two languages, and only one of them supports file IO, and even then, the file IO supported is almost useless. You could install something like Autoit3, which has far better support, but then if you are doing a restore, it might not be practical to write a script with that to "restore" the data back. I am not sure if it will run stand alone, or needs to be "installed" itself to work right.
Oh, and yeah, there is an "advanced" command line scripting system you can install from Microsoft, but again, you have to "install it" to make it do anything. Ironically, it also appears to be a clone of Bash, which kind of tells us what they are possibly doing with some of their new "connections" with the Linux community. I.e., stealing shit, replicating it, then not releasing the source to anyone, while claiming they own it. Same old, same old. lol One kind of wonders how they figure someone *else* won't sue them over theft of the code for Bash, even if Novell can't, according to their deal. Then again, all they would have to do is borrow the code from Unix needed to make their script system act like Bash, and side step that issue, I guess... But its definitely the same BS they have pulled before, every time they wanted to shift the landscape to reposition themselves and bury some competitor. |
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