Well, I had another catastrophic hard drive failure last night on my music editing computer - I lost a 3TB drive that contained most of my library.
Luckily, I've learned from past mistakes. I had that drive in a hardware RAID 1 configuration using the Mediasonic ProRAID external box. In RAID 1, also known as mirroring, the computer sees 2 drives as 1 - both drives are written to on the fly (so that they are identical) and both are used for reads (making them a little faster).
So, I do have the data on the other drive.
Hardware RAID 1 is, at least in my opinion, superior to merely backing up a drive, which is a software process and prone to failure. Plus there can be a period of time between work being done and the actual backup - if a drive fails during that period (as it is want to do, see Murphy's Law), then you've lost that work (which could be substantial).
Windows 7 & 8 Professional & Ultimate versions do support software Raid 1 (not the Home version), but they require that the drives be internal; external USB drives are not supported in this fashion (I guess they feel that these drives are transient in nature). If you have a computer tower, that's fine, but forget about an All-In-One, laptop or Small Form Factor machine.
I guess today is a hard drive rebuild day.
You set an important example we all need to follow... having a continuing backup system becayse failures arrive without appointments.
How old was the drive that died?
Were there any early warning symptoms, or did it just go "poof."
I was just thinking the other day, my system works too well to trust. I'm being setup by my own over-confidence.
I think some day the whole worldwide internet-computer universe will reach critical mass and parts will fly everywhere.
About 3 years old.
And no warning - just went 'poof' and was no longer accessible.
Drives should live longer than three years. I wonder what the "customer satisfaction" position of the manufacturer is?
Heck, if we have to dance fast between eguipment failures the entire future isn't worth its weight in bit-coins.
a few of times but never due to a disc hardware failure. The hardware failures I had were memory and discs but these did not result in data loss because I "heard them coming". Bad memory caused programs to abend (is that a word?) or otherwise become flaky (a technical term). The few disc failures were heralded by mechanical noise and abnormal seek retries before data loss. Guess I was just lucky.
The most recent event was with a data encryption program which apparently misfired and trashed part of my data disc. The disc itself was not damaged but the data were not readable even with a recovery program. I think the file access table and directory were corrupted but the data remained. Though it was not convenient most was backed up but some recent files were lost until I found a way to read the disc despite the damage. This reminded me of an important point which is "YOU CAN ONLY RECOVER DATA UP UNTIL THE LAST BACKUP!" RAID has an advantage with this since it is a continuous process.
Nonetheless, backups are part of the routine at the 8Z complex. One principle I follow is to not have the backup media as part of the computers. It is very likely that a hardware failure can take out both storage devices in the same system so I use both a separate computer on the LAN and USB external drives. My son runs with RAID discs and lost data on both from a system hardware failure.
No system is perfect but a very good way to do backups is to have two external storage devices and back up to one at a time. This way there is always a third backup device which is not connected at all so at no time is all the backup data connected to a system and thereby could be at risk. We used to call this "rotating backup" not to be confused with rotating discs.
The pros maintain backups off site at secure locations. The "cloud" backup idea is a good approach but personally I avoid this because of concerns for data security. You never know who can gain access to data and for what purpose.
Oh for the good ole days when the worst (other than theft or fire, etc.) that would happen is you dropped the file folder and had to spend hours collating.
Neil
Sitting here day dreaming about backing up is easier and more fun than taking action, risk be hanged.
I recall getting the 500GB Seagate harddrive (do I have that name right) from NewEgg. It was just prior to the popularity of 1 Terabyte drives (that sounds like an address - I live at 1 Terabyte Drive), and was the biggest drive I'd ever had.
But it wouldn't. I mean, it wouldn't get recognized, wouldn't format, was as receptive as a frozen dog.
NewEgg didn't care.
Seagate cared. First, they worked to try to excite the drive into life, sending me a Seagate Tools Utility, which picked and pecked from every angle to deterimine whether the drive was alive.
Unable to resucitate the drive, Seagate invited me to return it for factory analysis, and ended up sending me a replacement that has worked ever since.
It is a swell experience when manufacturers respond to a single customer (unmarried).