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.
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.
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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
OriginalGriff wrote:
"I poured juice in my keyboard".
Sniff. I still have one dead laptop caused by 'juice' (Smirnoff Storm) on the keyboard, and the HDD, and the mobo, and the battery, and the DVD. It's amazing how far 330ml can spread. All four walls of my bedroom even still have small splash-marks.
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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.
True, I guess Google isn't keeping theirs long enough.
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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.
The fact that your backup drives are in your computer is a little troubling. One nice spike from your power supply, and goodbye data. I have a few USB cases and I backup my data to these drives. When the backup is completed, I unplug and disconnect the drives and place them in the desk.
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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.
Modern PSU's don't apply a transformer but voltage regulators (better price, weight, efficiency).If these fail the output voltage goes UP AND UP AND OOOOOHHHHH POOOF!
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 -
Modern PSU's don't apply a transformer but voltage regulators (better price, weight, efficiency).If these fail the output voltage goes UP AND UP AND OOOOOHHHHH POOOF!
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 -
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.
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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.
Yeah mine did a while back. Took me 6 days to get back out of recovery mode.
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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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.
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You'll need multiple failures on a better PSU which will monitor the regulation and pull the plug if it goes haywire.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
That's why I said "by cheap PSU's" in the OR :D
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 -
That's why I said "by cheap PSU's" in the OR :D
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! | sighistGood PSUs can still let the magic smoke out of a system if damaged severely enough even though it's much less common. A close enough lightning strike will send a power spike big enough to blow through any defenses this side of a double conversion UPS(?) before they can self destruct to protect downstream components.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
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Good PSUs can still let the magic smoke out of a system if damaged severely enough even though it's much less common. A close enough lightning strike will send a power spike big enough to blow through any defenses this side of a double conversion UPS(?) before they can self destruct to protect downstream components.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
How frequent is that for you? It's really rare here unless you have ancient wiring. Thunderstorms are not that frequent (averaged over the year), but I've never seen one take out any equipment - heard of a few, though. The worst thing for dropouts is an overeager protective earth conductor being mishandled.
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
