As a followup to my recent post on backups, let’s say you use an external hard drive to make backups. If you’ve had some malware blow away your data on your local hard drive, you now want to be extremely careful while handling your backup copy. I certainly wouldn’t want to mount my external hard drive with the risk of malware deleting my only available backup (even if I were careful about cleaning up malware from my system). It would be comforting if I could flip a switch and make the external hard drive read-only after I’ve experienced data loss.
Back in the day, floppy disks had such a feature, and so did Zip disks. I wish this were a standard feature on external hard drives. And no, “mount as read-only” (which is a software solution) does not count.
Posted by Apu Kapadia 
