>>>>>>Do you back up elsewhere as well? In the classic examples of fire and theft, everything inside the box is going to be gone.
>>>>>
>>>>>I always have six backups! They are on my two servers (one at work, and one at home), on my two workstations, on a removable HD, and on my laptop. And no, I am not paranoid! :-)
>>>>
>>>>After what happened to me two years ago, I feel strongly that's the right approach to data backup. Never again!
>>>
>>>About 17 years ago my office was broken into, BIG&HEAVY desktop dismatled and all of 6 HD's stolen.
>>>Funny thing was, they also searched my office and took all used safety tapes, the tape drive as well,
>>>while leaving the brand new unopened safety tapes.
>>>
>>>Was quite happy tthat the monthly backup in the bank vault was only two weeks old and that I was paranoid...
>>>
>>
>>It sure was.
>>
>>That office burglary almost sounds like industrial sabotage. Did you have any competitors who might have done something like that?
>>
>>I have already been disappointed today on the upgrade front. All the prep work was done last night and first thing this morning I opened the PC up to install the new hard drive. Unfortunately, even though the existing drive is SATA according to Dell (lookup by service tag), it has different connections on the back of the drive. And no cables in the box. That kind of burns me up because I specifically avoided drives described as OEM. Amazon seems to be pretty good about that, and this one (a Western Digital Caviar drive) was not described as OEM, but all that was in the box was the drive and four screws. I just ordered some cables online that look like the right ones, fingers crossed. This is why I hate hardware.
>
>Look very carefully at the connector. I'm sure I bought a HD once with an adapter already fitted. At first glance it looked like the wrong pin setup but the adapter could be removed revealing the correct pins underneath......

Thanks for the tip. No such luck, though.