In article , ultred ragnusen
wrote:


I have a dozen ten year old Zip drives and HDDs which suffer mainly from
worse faults than do my internal HDDs. For one, the ZIP drive data is lost
forever, because I don't even know how to get it back.

zip never was reliable.

For another, some of
the older HDDs suffer from proprietary power supplies, where if I lose the
cable or if the power supply goes bad, I'm hosed

open the enclosure and pull the mechanism.

. For another, a HDD can
EASILY get corrupted. If I haven't mentioned that yet, just unplug it after
backing up hundreds of megabytes,

no it doesn't.

and then cry (as I did) when you can't
fnid the data except by Recuva, where all the files are flat and the names
are all missing their first character (don't ask me why - just ask me why I
cried).

if that's the case, then recuva is garbage.