My external hard drive failed yesterday, and I've lost years worth of photos, my iTunes and all sorts of other things, including the Tex games I bought off GoG the other week.
Of course I did have a backup... on a different partition of the same hard drive, which is also lost.
The local IT shop can't get the drive working so I'm going to go to a specialist shop in london to open the hard drive up and see if they can do any better. Apparently it will cost between £200 and £1000 IF they can recover anything at all.
At least the GoG games I can re-download, and there are ways no doubt of getting my songs etc off my iPod, but three years worth of photos is a real killer - every photo of myself and my fiance!
Cub do you still just as cautious about backing up as you were when you got your data recovered? I remember you were lucky enough to get your bits back.
Of course I did have a backup... on a different partition of the same hard drive, which is also lost.
The local IT shop can't get the drive working so I'm going to go to a specialist shop in london to open the hard drive up and see if they can do any better. Apparently it will cost between £200 and £1000 IF they can recover anything at all.
At least the GoG games I can re-download, and there are ways no doubt of getting my songs etc off my iPod, but three years worth of photos is a real killer - every photo of myself and my fiance!
Cub do you still just as cautious about backing up as you were when you got your data recovered? I remember you were lucky enough to get your bits back.
David
Oh no that's terrible. 
I'm a bit paranoid myself. I had my photos, videos, and mp3s stored in 3 places: main computer, external hard drive, and NAS network hard drive.
I just recently found out my external hard drive failed to turn on too. I don't know if it's wasted or not. But I haven't bothered to worry about it since I've got two other places to get my stuff. I'm like a squirrel stashing my nuts for winter.
I'm a bit paranoid myself. I had my photos, videos, and mp3s stored in 3 places: main computer, external hard drive, and NAS network hard drive.I just recently found out my external hard drive failed to turn on too. I don't know if it's wasted or not. But I haven't bothered to worry about it since I've got two other places to get my stuff. I'm like a squirrel stashing my nuts for winter.
Samantha
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
I run a external drive solely as a backup & also have a flash drive for everyday stuff.
real bad luck when it happens, I am always amused when people think theirr drive is safe and nothing can happen to it.
actually I don't recall if cub did have any luck getting anything off his failed drive.
real bad luck when it happens, I am always amused when people think theirr drive is safe and nothing can happen to it.
actually I don't recall if cub did have any luck getting anything off his failed drive.
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
tex murphy is back in town
That's terrible David! And yes, I can no doubt share your pain.
In answer to your question though, I am extremely adamant about backing up now. In fact, every single Hard Drive in my computer has it's own backup drive paired with it, and once a week all drives are synchronised. However, I also do manual synchronisation every time I add a particularly large number of files, or important photos, etc. All of the backup drives are external, connected via eSATA (for speed) but you can do USB which works just as well, but it takes a little longer to back-up if you made lots of changes between backups. But if you set it to do it every week as 3am on a Monday morning when you are asleep it should be no problem.
If and when you get your data recovered, I have this great piece of free software you can use to keep backups synchronised on an external drive. It's called SyncBack and it is great for this kind of thing.
Baf... I was able to get a 100% recovery of that drives that failed. It was a particularly hairy situation for me because it was a RAID-0 array which died. This meant my data was split across 2 drives (in 128kb chunks) and they had to do a recovery of both and then reassemble the split data for me. Cost $1,000 to do, so I am assuming a single drive recovery would be a lot cheaper.
Good luck David... recovery is usually successful provided that you have not attempted to do too much with the drive after it failed. You will probably find if you can't recover all the files, you will get a good number of them back.
-Cub. =o)
In answer to your question though, I am extremely adamant about backing up now. In fact, every single Hard Drive in my computer has it's own backup drive paired with it, and once a week all drives are synchronised. However, I also do manual synchronisation every time I add a particularly large number of files, or important photos, etc. All of the backup drives are external, connected via eSATA (for speed) but you can do USB which works just as well, but it takes a little longer to back-up if you made lots of changes between backups. But if you set it to do it every week as 3am on a Monday morning when you are asleep it should be no problem.
If and when you get your data recovered, I have this great piece of free software you can use to keep backups synchronised on an external drive. It's called SyncBack and it is great for this kind of thing.
Baf... I was able to get a 100% recovery of that drives that failed. It was a particularly hairy situation for me because it was a RAID-0 array which died. This meant my data was split across 2 drives (in 128kb chunks) and they had to do a recovery of both and then reassemble the split data for me. Cost $1,000 to do, so I am assuming a single drive recovery would be a lot cheaper.
Good luck David... recovery is usually successful provided that you have not attempted to do too much with the drive after it failed. You will probably find if you can't recover all the files, you will get a good number of them back.
-Cub. =o)
I always recommend to people to back your files up to another drive completely... Never back up your files to the same drive, even if it is another partition... When a drive crashes it usually takes the whole thing down, not just any one partition... Though in some cases it is just the one partition that is affected, but usually it is the whole drive...
Even if your back up is to a Flash Drive or a USB Thumb Drive, at least it is a different drive... If you use one of these types of storage as your back up, make sure you check it every so often {maybe once a month} to make sure it is still intact, because these types of storage can just die for no reason at any time... It's also recommended {depending on your usage} that you back up everything you feel is important about once a month... Pick a day like the 1st or last day of the month as your Back Up Day, the day you make your back up and make sure you stick to it...
I wish you the best of luck in getting your files recovered...
Even if your back up is to a Flash Drive or a USB Thumb Drive, at least it is a different drive... If you use one of these types of storage as your back up, make sure you check it every so often {maybe once a month} to make sure it is still intact, because these types of storage can just die for no reason at any time... It's also recommended {depending on your usage} that you back up everything you feel is important about once a month... Pick a day like the 1st or last day of the month as your Back Up Day, the day you make your back up and make sure you stick to it...
I wish you the best of luck in getting your files recovered...
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it wasn't baf that mentioned your hard disk recovery- it was me.Cubase wrote: Baf... I was able to get a 100% recovery of that drives that failed. It was a particularly hairy situation for me because it was a RAID-0 array which died. This meant my data was split across 2 drives (in 128kb chunks) and they had to do a recovery of both and then reassemble the split data for me. Cost $1,000 to do, so I am assuming a single drive recovery would be a lot cheaper.
-Cub. =o)
I also use a esata drive as a backup, but mainly as imaged drives.
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
tex murphy is back in town
Well I don't know if I'm wasting my time recovering from a million old photo DVDs but I've found tons and tons of photos and it looks like I've probably lost six months of my own stuff, but my fiance Adele has probably lost 12 months of stuff as she never backed things up at all.
With any luck they may still get my old drive working, next week, but it's interesting spending the time doing this - I found an old Tex folder with my 2004 Tex calendar in (was that my first one??), along with all of the downloads that used to be on the UTM website.
There's nostalgia for ya!
With any luck they may still get my old drive working, next week, but it's interesting spending the time doing this - I found an old Tex folder with my 2004 Tex calendar in (was that my first one??), along with all of the downloads that used to be on the UTM website.
There's nostalgia for ya!
David
Ah, yes, my badplumgas wrote: it wasn't baf that mentioned your hard disk recovery- it was me.
I usually look at avatars first, and for some reason I mixed them up. Sorry.
Haha, yeah its amazing what you can find if you dig up old stuff. I don't think I have ever deleted a file since 1997. I just replace drives, back up the wold ones, but always enable myself access to everything.Demonlawyer wrote:Well I don't know if I'm wasting my time recovering from a million old photo DVDs but I've found tons and tons of photos and it looks like I've probably lost six months of my own stuff, but my fiance Adele has probably lost 12 months of stuff as she never backed things up at all.
With any luck they may still get my old drive working, next week, but it's interesting spending the time doing this - I found an old Tex folder with my 2004 Tex calendar in (was that my first one??), along with all of the downloads that used to be on the UTM website.
There's nostalgia for ya!
-Cub. =o)
if all else fails, buy a $5 per month website and load all your backups there. for $5 you could get easily a full 1TB server possibly more. This is what I do and its very very effective, these companies have to take care of your data for you, $5 a month is worth it IMO.
This is what I've been doing with a lot of work stuff.
Load SVN onto it and use it like an external hard drive, only with fully respritory so you can revert back to previous file states. Only problem is you need to know what you're doing to get SVN setup, but just using an FTP is also fine.
This is what I've been doing with a lot of work stuff.
Load SVN onto it and use it like an external hard drive, only with fully respritory so you can revert back to previous file states. Only problem is you need to know what you're doing to get SVN setup, but just using an FTP is also fine.
Well I was tempted to upload Adele's latest cakes to her facebook account and I was going to update her website (thankfully that has her cake photos as at about a year ago).
The drive is now with a guy who will let me know in the next day or two where I'm at, but he was saying he gets about 4 or 5 of these problems every day! He said that newer drives fail more often than older ones too (great, I've just bought two!) because they spin faster and there's more hard drive space to go wrong.
The drive is now with a guy who will let me know in the next day or two where I'm at, but he was saying he gets about 4 or 5 of these problems every day! He said that newer drives fail more often than older ones too (great, I've just bought two!) because they spin faster and there's more hard drive space to go wrong.
David
That's actually quite true. Before the issues I had I never had any problems with HDDs... in fact, a lot of old drives that I have been using for 10 years are still going strong, and so far I have had 4 drives (bought within the last 2 years) fail in some way or another.Demonlawyer wrote: He said that newer drives fail more often than older ones too (great, I've just bought two!) because they spin faster and there's more hard drive space to go wrong.
In my experience I find Western Digital very solid drives with little issues, as 3 out of the 4 of mine that failed were Seagate... the only WD drive that failed did so because the external enclosure it was in shorted it thanks to bad volatages it was supplying the drive.
Interestingly though, most of my older drives are Seagate, because it was almost the opposite in terms of releiability. Different times now I guess. The person who I took mine to get fixed said that WDs make up the least of those taken to him for repair, with Seagate being the highest. WDs are also more recoverable apparently thanks to an easier to work with mechanism (apparently).
-Cub. =o)