My laptop is about 4 years old so I'm lacking a DVD RW drive but am looking into an external USB unit. With all the stuff about EMP, what would you do if your HD was wiped clean? You may be fine for 3mo or years, depends upon how long it took to get everything back but once that happens what about all your personal records, downloads, music, recipe's, banking records, etc? While a standard CD is only 700MB a DVD RW is 4.7Gig. You could probably get everything on 2 or 3 discs and a stack of them would allow you to make a couple copies of things to store at a friend or relatives house for safekeeping if something happened to your masters. While I hope if there's an EMP we're down for years it doesn't change the fact if we're down for 3 months having all your data could be huge to rebuild your finances or even prove ownership via loan papers or receipts if it was an internet purchase.

Maybe a little tweaking this is what i am trying to get done, a dynamo, An old laptop i have with a cd or dvd rom and some flash or USB powered external drives and maybe spare parts.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/1 ... aptop.html


At least this is one of my goals, the link above is just something so you would get the idea.

While I had/am considering something on that order it still doesn't eliminate the threat of data loss via EMP or if there's wide spread looting, theft. Being able to restore all your data on a new computer if yours is hit by EMP or stolen is just another "safety net" just like all our food, seeds, fuel & ammo and the most reliable way to do it would be via CD/DVD since no one can prove a thumb drive or external HDD would not be damaged by EMP. It's the old joke about the backup to the backup to the backup.