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Hard Disk Crash

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  • R Rob Philpott

    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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    Tom Deketelaere
    wrote on last edited by
    #17

    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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    • J Jorgen Andersson

      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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      AspDotNetDev
      wrote on last edited by
      #18

      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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      • R Rob Philpott

        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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        Stuart Dootson
        wrote on last edited by
        #19

        No - but that doesn't stop the (disimilar) backups...

        1. TimeMachine to a Firewire disk - that stays plugged in all the time my Macbook Pro's at my home 'workstation'
        2. CarbonCopyCloner to a Firewire disk - I update that image every couple of weeks or so
        3. 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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        • R Rob Philpott

          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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          Dave Parker
          wrote on last edited by
          #20

          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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          • T Tom Deketelaere

            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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            Dave Parker
            wrote on last edited by
            #21

            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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            • OriginalGriffO OriginalGriff

              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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              Brady Kelly
              wrote on last edited by
              #22

              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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              • A AspDotNetDev

                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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                Jorgen Andersson
                wrote on last edited by
                #23

                True, I guess Google isn't keeping theirs long enough.

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                • R Rob Philpott

                  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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                  ednrg
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #24

                  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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                  • R Rob Philpott

                    Interesting - 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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                    peterchen
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #25

                    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

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                    • P peterchen

                      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

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                      Dan Neely
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #26

                      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.

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                      • R Rob Philpott

                        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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                        snowman53
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #27

                        I've had five or six HD failures over the last year. Most were of the data recoverable type, but one was a true unrecoverable crash that took down my web server.

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                        • R Rob Philpott

                          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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                          Mustafa Ismail Mustafa
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #28

                          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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                          • R Rob Philpott

                            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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                            Dan Neely
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #29

                            I had one back in 03 or 04. My kid brother's had two, both probably due to being a fumble fingered klutz and repeatedly dropping it...

                            The latest nation. Procrastination.

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                            • D Dan Neely

                              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.

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                              peterchen
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #30

                              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

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                              • P peterchen

                                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

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                                Dan Neely
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #31

                                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.

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                                • D Dan Neely

                                  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.

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                                  P Offline
                                  peterchen
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #32

                                  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

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