Yeah, best advice for any data storage:

BACKUP, then back that up... then back that up... then back that up offsite.

SpinRite is a good one, have used.

Edit: HDD Regen is more aimed at repair just fyi.

It's a joke. I've seen drives work fine for years with it showing imminent drive failure and I've seen drives die instantly with no warning given whatsoever.

There is no perfect tool that I could say, each drive manufacturer makes their own, and there are numerous third party tools out there as well. My best advice is have them all and have them handy. One I use quite a bit is HDD Regenerator, pretty thorough utility but it takes some time to run.

Perfectly said. I wish the mod points went higher than 5 for your post alone.

Damn, apparently I am new here haha. Been told that twice already, I'll just shut up now.

No, but I almost always see it on the firehose or something before I read it somewhere else.

I couldn't agree more, unfortunately they drove a lot of good businesses out of business with some of their marketing tactics and cheap product that small business couldn't compete with. Too bad this didn't happen ten years ago.

This is one of the first times I have read something on a major news site before /. had it. Saw this yesterday.

I never stated that I thought public information being public was shocking me. Man, I sense some hostility. I don't recall saying that science fiction was bad either.

I just raised a question, I even stated that I "Could just be me being paranoid". When did /. become so damn hostile. Holy shit.

I understand the public knowledge part of it, that is fine. I just find it as kind of a sneaky way to get actual humans to identify the numbers.

They're using us to identify our own home and business addresses, does anyone else feel a little violated by this?

Could just be me being paranoid, but this sounds like something out of a science fiction book. Whoever had the idea to do this, I have to admit, was really using their head though.

Another game that I wont be purchasing. Glad I still own all my old games.

You left out the part where another contractor designs another version of said pigeons and undercuts this contractor with an inferior product because they had the lowest bid and then the people that awarded the bid to the cheaper contractor are left wondering why the cheaper pigeons are falling from the skies and killing innocent citizens.

Mod up please.

This is the problem with the "war or terror". There is no end, the US government will never be able to declare a victory over this enemy. This plays right into their grand scheme of things, they have a free pass to do whatever they want anywhere in the world and the perfect terrorist attack to justify it.

This is why you will never see a real investigation into the events of September 11th, if there were ever any highly publicized cracks in the story of what happened that day it would bring down the entire house of cards.