Last evening my PC harddrive uttered the dreaded 'click of death' and ground to a halt. Luckily (depending on your point of view) it was the OS drive, not the one that holds all the data. Bloody WD drive was only 7 years old. Even yesterday S.M.A.R.T. told me it was perfectly happy. Next machine is going to have RAID1 all the way, I can tell you. /RANT
7 years is atleast twice longer than any of my drives have lasted (in use, anyway). But yeah it always sucks. Then again, you get a great reason to re-install everything and get the joy of fresh installation.
I feel your pain Nexxo. At least, as you've already hinted, it wasn't your data drive. That would be tragic. Did you set Windows 7 to image your boot drive for you? I've done that and it works brilliantly. Only 37GB for a 60GB image.
No problem. Insert new drive... boot from your back up software's recover disk, and recover from your most recent back up. 15 minute job and you'll be back where you were, up to and including the contents of your recycle bin. You were backed up weren't you? Seriously... 7 years? I wouldn't trust a drive past 5, and it's rare I use any that old, as they get recycled into my wife's machines after 2 or so, so nothing goes for more than 4 years here. I've had drives fail much sooner than that. If you were running a 7 year old drive with no back up, you have balls of high carbon steel. You do know that RAID isn't back up of course... yeah, I'm sure you do As for SMART not informing you of impending disaster; It can't predict sudden mechanical failure, which after 7 years, is pretty likely.
I have mirrored pairs for all my bulky data, but this thread has reminded me that I actually don't have a backup for my main documents/music drive. Anxiety. Also, that's one descriptive thread title there, combined with the Rant tag it basically says the same thing twice
It's too easy to forget about a decent backup solution... With storage so cheap these days it's easy to both forget and do decent backups. I must buy a 1TB drive sometime and put all my important shiz on it.
I backup to a HDD in my main machine. Now that I'm going to university, I'm a little worried about theft so I reckon I'm going to have to invest in a 2TB external drive and start an offsite backup of my most important data to my parents' house. That's a lot of money I don't want to be spending, though. Still, I could buy a new CPU/Mobo/etc/ect but I can't exactly buy my data back.
Yeah, luckily I do back up. I have Vista but did do a mirror on the data drive -- it is a bit old but at least I can resurrect my Samurize and Miranda configs. I also keep all my emails and contacts on the NHS mail Exchange and Google IMAP servers. Data is backed up on memory stick, online storage and of course (for media) my iPhone. Paranoia is cheesecake. Still disappointed though. In the olden days HDDs lasted at least a decade. RAID-1 isn't back-up but at least would allow me to limp along and change the drive without hassle. I wonder how reliable SDDs are these days... Crap. It's time to build a new computer. Something steampunk. And I was going to build a NAS (Ada), so it's time to get cracking.
I get put in the hospital, and come back to THIS??? Nexxo's gonna mod again. ...and I had just gotten over my inferiority complex.
Wish I could afford the storage to mirror my drives, or even image the buggers >.> Side note: How long do you guys normally leave your drives before replacing them? Run them until they die, or regular replacement? I opt for the latter, 18 month gaps between replacements. Expensive, yes, but I run them almost 24/7, so..
About 7 years ago I had a catastrophic disk failure, total wreak, none of the recovery software would work. It was before digital cameras had taken off, so it was mosty docs and stuff. But there was important data that I lost. I vowed "NEVER AGAIN" Times change quiclky, I've got a flash based video camera, Phone camera, 10mp camera, My wifes camera, her phone camera, and both my kids have kiddy digi cameras. Every time we go somewhere interesting we can take loads of photos. Data that can't be replaced. As the "techie" for work and mates I get alot of requests for data loss recovery, and 90%+ of the time I can get data from drives. It is really bad the number of people who have no backup. I've had people in floods of tears beacuse thier honeymoon pictures had gone (I got them back) , but I ALWAYS make the point that it COULD have gone forever. When I build PC's for mates I always ask them to get a backup, if they're upgrading I tend to take the old PC's HD and put it in a caddy, it costs about £10, a no brainer really. SO I'm now quite anal about data backup. I've got 2 1tb Hard disks, one live in my machine as a data drive, the other in a USB caddy. Every few weeks I'll plug the USB and copy the data contents of the data drive. I leave the USB drive in a small metal box (not locked) to help keep it safe. I keep meaning to get another 1tb USB drive and rotate backups and leave one at my dads house, I also want to scan in various documents (like buildings & conents insurance docs) so I've got a copy of all paper work if the house got burnt down.... Seriously Guys. If you can't afford to loose it, back it up.
Online storage is cheesecake. Usually it's free (unless you need insane amounts of storage) and you can rest safe knowing it is RAIDed and backed up to the eyeballs, and accessible anywhere, anytime. I just checked: my drives (WD1200JB) were first in use on 12th february 2005. One failed yesterday. Many people report running a WD1200JB for 8 years or more. Mine should have lasted a bit longer.
All I did was skimmed the thread, read a post by Nexxo saying "New computer" and "Steampunk", and jizzed. Seriously though, I replace my drives after 2 years (they're usually full by that point anyway so I just spend £50 on whatever I can get and transfer it over) The system drive in the family computer must be coming up to 5 years old now, but it's only XP so when it fails we have an excuse to buy Windows 7
In my job I have to deal with a lot of dead HDDs... And SMART status is usually an absolute waste of time. I'm usually surprised when it tells me I actually have a defective HDD of some sort, because I can't remember the last time it did. Example: Drive will not unmount at all. Therefore, cannot format! However, SMART says A-OK! *tear out hair*
When they get full! I had a 500GB drive. Filled it up so I got a 750GB drive. Filled that but 1TB drives had just been released so I got one. I mirrow my largest drive onto the newest drive then I put my 2 second largest (old & full) drives into service as backup drives. If an old backup drive fails, I can just mirror the live drive onto a new backup drive (although I'd probably buy a new main drive and put my current drive into backup service ). Then I sell any spare drives after the switcheroo.
I replace my system drive every year... any valuable data (photos, mainly) is backed up on a RAIDed NAS and a USB drive.
Just had my main drive (seagate) fail after only a year, and am currently restoring from my backup. First problem I've had with any of the seagate drives I've had. Gave me the excuse to by a new samsung f3 1tb backup drive.
