Thank you for you answer and thank you to remind me I'm still a newby. I've been using OpenBSD exclusively since a year, and sometimes think I know quite a lot already, but I would not ask so many questions if I did.
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It sounds like you are putting all of your eggs into one basket by completely trusting this one external drive.
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Well, I already have a copy of everything on dvd, probably some stuff is not on dvd now, but most of it is.
This time I want to do a new "inventary" while transferring data to the new drive.
Why am I putting so much effort on this drive/backup/storage space thing?
There are a few reasons: in my computing experience I found out that if you don't plan things well in advance and if you don't consider future compatibility, you might find yourself in trouble afterwards.
Another reason is that I want to have a unique drive to be used to store my data (I can do further backups to cd dvd). Or even better, I have to learn to backup things in a clever way, that is with a software that backups only things that have changed since last backup (if I'm right dump option 0 to 9), because in the past I often found myself with changed files (the same file) in different places and at the end not knowing wich one I should have kept, and spending time in checking them all. This summer I should finally be able to by myself a notebook, I will need this even more.
Another reason is that I lately heard very many scary story about data loss, the last one this winter when my sister had her notebook stolen, with everything in it and... no backup.
Another reason is that I know by experience that hardware sooner or later will fail (if you remember, last year my notebook's embedded ram failed, so now it's unusable, it boots fine, but if you use it for a while it hangs forever). So this ppc i386 compatibility issue is very important to me.
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Honestly decide what information is worth all of this effort.
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In life you vey often find out how things are important only when you lose them...
Considering all this and you suggestions, I think I will do this:
Simply format my drive with my mac mini and use it. Double check that everything is on dvd also. Then, from that point on, make sure that new data will be backed up regularly to cd or dvd (maybe get a rewritable cdrom and leave it inside).
In the future I might as well consider on line storing to have an off site backup at least for most important things.
How does it sound?
