Hard Disk Crash
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I've had plenty. I use Norton Ghost to back up my files as I work.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Oh yes. About two years ago, my wifes HDD failed out-of-the-blue. Replaced. Then about a month later mine went. Same make, same model. It happens, HDD failure is probably the most common hardware fault in a PC other than "I poured juice in my keyboard". Probably because they have mechanical systems as well as electronic. Back up. Do it now! Well backed up computers rarely fail!
No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Just last June I had my power supply fry. It took out both disks. Dead-dead-dead. It isn't always the disk itself. And I do occasionally have a drink sitting near my machine. I just have a USB terrabyte drive and a batch file that runs backup then shutdown. The batch is set to date compare the files and only copy if the file has a newer date stamp. Occasionally I go to the big drive and rename the backup so the next backup will be full. I've had to recover several times from the Terrabyte drive. Natch, your mileage will vary from mine. Seems like you just have to do the old decision; "what can't I live without?". Then don't worry about the odds. USB drives are pretty inexpensive compared to doing without files you can't recover.
_____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.
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Just last June I had my power supply fry. It took out both disks. Dead-dead-dead. It isn't always the disk itself. And I do occasionally have a drink sitting near my machine. I just have a USB terrabyte drive and a batch file that runs backup then shutdown. The batch is set to date compare the files and only copy if the file has a newer date stamp. Occasionally I go to the big drive and rename the backup so the next backup will be full. I've had to recover several times from the Terrabyte drive. Natch, your mileage will vary from mine. Seems like you just have to do the old decision; "what can't I live without?". Then don't worry about the odds. USB drives are pretty inexpensive compared to doing without files you can't recover.
_____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.
Yikes! Both disks at once?! The only way I envisaged that happening was if the computer was stolen. Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Oh yes. About two years ago, my wifes HDD failed out-of-the-blue. Replaced. Then about a month later mine went. Same make, same model. It happens, HDD failure is probably the most common hardware fault in a PC other than "I poured juice in my keyboard". Probably because they have mechanical systems as well as electronic. Back up. Do it now! Well backed up computers rarely fail!
No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones
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Yikes! Both disks at once?! The only way I envisaged that happening was if the computer was stolen. Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Many years ago, the company I worked for was hit by lightning - a ground strike - which made a hardware engineer glow briefly, and destroyed the fax, phone exchange, sound system and every IDE card in the building that was plugged into the mains, whether switched on or not. A company a mile or so away have a UPS on their VAX, which exploded and sprayed battery acid round the computer room... New IDE cards later, all PC were fine.
No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones
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I've had plenty. I use Norton Ghost to back up my files as I work.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Different subject, your signature 'Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.' How's that going? How do you do ordinary stuff ie. Visual Studio? Parallels?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
A few - either accumulating bad sectors (noticed usually as "computer gets slow" on clients), or fried to death by dying cheap PSUs.
Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist -
Who made the drives out of interest?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Fujitsu I think - can't remember the models though.
No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones
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A few - either accumulating bad sectors (noticed usually as "computer gets slow" on clients), or fried to death by dying cheap PSUs.
Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
| FoldWithUs! | sighistInteresting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Different subject, your signature 'Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.' How's that going? How do you do ordinary stuff ie. Visual Studio? Parallels?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
It's parallels now, because VMWare became useless. Parallels is not much better, but I use Parallels to run my Boot Camp partition inside OSX, and then I boot to Windows when I need to. It's working fine, I do enjoy being on Mac for my day to day computing, and using Windows only when I have to.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Yikes! Both disks at once?! The only way I envisaged that happening was if the computer was stolen. Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
Perhaps you were just very, very unlucky...
Or perhaps just one of those 'very'. They were put under a great deal of voltage with almost no protection. I can't blame the poor devils for frying. Sometimes you just get a lemon component. If its critical what you have is a 'wet cleanup in aisle 3'. Neither drive was redundant anyway. One was a small, fast SATA for games and a few other things, the other was slower but much bigger and held tons of apps that didn't need speed. And docs, music, and my Knowledge Base directories.
_____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
If you make a search on it you'll find that there is quite a lot of statistics on harddrive failures. Usually they break during the first three months or when they're older than 3 years. According to Google, who's having quite a few harddrives to make statistics on, their failure rate is 1 in every 17 drives.
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Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Oh, and to top it off mine wasn't a cheap PSU. My new one is, however. My thought: If I'm not going to get my money's worth from the thing then why pay more? It was expensive, it was from Antec, as I recall.
_____________________________ I've often heard of an older, wiser person passing the torch. After witnessing something like that, I'm not sure who'd want the thing.
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Interesting - second person who said their drives were taken out by a PSU. I've never heard of that before.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
A rogue PSU can fry anything in the PC. We've seen motherboards, HDs, PCI cards, optical drives individually taken down by PSU failures. As for backing up my HD I do an NTBACKUP of the entire system to external USB drive overnight, keeping at least half a dozen backup file on there. Also use Mozy remote backup solution to keep a copy of my 'development' folder. R
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly
That depends on what you want. I have a simple 500gig NAS system at home (well not exactly industry grade NAS but hell enough for the important stuff) that basicly is 2 hard drives that copy each other, k still a chance of everything going wrong but having 2 hard drives fail at the same moment would be a clear indication that the universe is against me and that I should stop fighting it ;P
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If you make a search on it you'll find that there is quite a lot of statistics on harddrive failures. Usually they break during the first three months or when they're older than 3 years. According to Google, who's having quite a few harddrives to make statistics on, their failure rate is 1 in every 17 drives.
Jörgen Andersson wrote:
their failure rate is 1 in every 17
Fight Club narrator said:
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
No - but that doesn't stop the (disimilar) backups...
- TimeMachine to a Firewire disk - that stays plugged in all the time my Macbook Pro's at my home 'workstation'
- CarbonCopyCloner to a Firewire disk - I update that image every couple of weeks or so
- Backup to a NAS drive - just things like photos - I use a home-brew script that uses rsync (which is uber-cool in a very geeky way, IMO) as the underlying sychronisation technology).
And I'm intending getting another Firewire drive to get 'off-site' backup capability - just not sure whether I should use TimeMachine or Carbon Copy Cloner as the backup mechanism.
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Been thinking again this morning about a back up strategy in case of a hard disk crash. I've got three hard discs in my computer and just copy anything important onto a different disc now and again. I'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly. But I haven't had a disk crash for about 15 years either at work or home. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. Has anyone else?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I've had the opposite experience, I've never had a HD crash until this year. I still have loads of old drives that probably still work but are kinda useless due to their now small capacity. Earlier this year the HD in my media center just suddenly became undetectable by the BIOS - tried it in another machine and nothing can detect it anymore even though the disk still spins up when receiving power. If you have 3 disks you could use something like trueimage to image things to a different drive periodically - it doesn't seem to add much overhead compared to other backup solutions I've seen which slow the computer down a lot while running. Personally I only have 1 HD in mine (mostly due to concerns over increased noise and higher power consumption with having more). I backup over my LAN to a different machine. BTW I've heard that when multiple HDs are in the same machine there is a tendency for them to all fail at the same time - I don't know how true that is but it's probably better to back up to a different machine on your LAN if that's feasible.
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Rob Philpott wrote:
'd like a NAS drive thing, but they're costly
That depends on what you want. I have a simple 500gig NAS system at home (well not exactly industry grade NAS but hell enough for the important stuff) that basicly is 2 hard drives that copy each other, k still a chance of everything going wrong but having 2 hard drives fail at the same moment would be a clear indication that the universe is against me and that I should stop fighting it ;P
I've never seen any attractively priced NAS devices that are decent (support standard windows file shares, more than 1 HDD etc), they always seem to be more expensive than a full computer system. I bought a cheap one a few years ago for about £20 into which I can put a single IDE HDD and has an ethernet and USB connector. When saving files to it over the network though it just seems to corrupt nearly every file that's placed on it.
