1 TB dead! Waaaah!

[miriam_e]

One of my 1 terabyte drives has suddenly, inexplicably died. Waaah! I bought it less than a year ago and it was almost full. Some of it was backed up, but much wasn't -- how do you backup a 1TB drive? The only way is with a second 1TB drive, and I didn't think I could afford to splash out on another drive merely as backup for my most recent drive. The disk itself is under warranty, but the data is the most valuable part.

Crap. Crap. Crap!

I'd been getting creepy, uneasy feelings about my oldest drive -- a now-ancient 120GB drive almost 7 years old, and was trying to gather the funds to buy a backup drive to safeguard the data on it. Who would have thought that my youngest drive would be the first to die. :(

Dammit!

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Is it worth trying a data recovery service?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I'm half considering that, though they are supposed to be incredibly expensive (hundreds of dollar, I believe... I should call one up to check).

Today has been spent sorting through oodles of directories of stuff. Luckily I habitually (obsessively) use redundancy on almost everything, so I have a lot of copies of stuff -- many more than I thought I had, which is a great relief. I have still lost a lot, but not quite as much as I'd thought. Some of the newer stuff was, I think, mostly books downloaded from the net. Most of those are on Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Australia, Textbook Revolution, and BookBoon so can be downloaded again.

My newer CDs and DVDs can be ripped again -- time-consuming, but not a great problem.

I need to set aside funds for another backup drive. It is scary not having duplicate copies for so much of this stuff now.

I really need to learn more about S.M.A.R.T. drive technology. Most drives have it, but no operating system that I know of uses it as standard. There is this technology that can warn us when a drive is about to fail, but is mostly just out of reach. How stupid is that.

[thorfinn]

SMART doesn't really help you. Disks can and will just fail without any warning.

Any single point of failure is just that.

If you want a real backup, try: http://mozy.com/home/

Of course, it'll take a long time (and a lot of bandwidth) to back up everything, and catastrophic restore would be expensive (ship you a disk from the US, ouch), but if you're not backed up off site, you're not backed up.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

SMART increases the chances that data can be retrieved before things are irreversible, but point taken. Bad things can still happen suddenly and with little or no warning.

I must say I've been getting increasingly nervous about having everything here on one site. It is one of the reasons I'm growing more affectionate of external hard drives. I can pick them up and take them up to my folks' place and store them there. Every time bushfire season comes in I get the heebie-jeebies again.

There certainly is a lot to be said for off-site storage. And with Linux I could connect to my Folks' machine and still have access to my data from here.

Thanks David. You've really helped to push my mind along some neat directions. :)

[thorfinn]

Good good. :-) This is all tech that's been in the corporate world for some time (networked raid storage, filesystem snapshots for online backups, offsite storage for backups), but it's really starting to move into the reach of ordinary home users as the price drops towards the very cheap and in some cases free.

I highly recommend using Dropbox and MozyHome for really critical files in addition to doing your own raid + offsite backups. You get 2GB free, which is not a huge amount, but it's enough for really critical documents.

Sign up for dropbox using this link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTIzMjE0NTM5

and you and I will both get an extra 250MB of free storage. :-)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'll think on that. My data requirements tend to get a little heavy. The smallest area on my drives is the text directory which is almost 30GB in size. Other areas go way beyond that. My audio directory (music, radio recordings, downloaded talks, etc) almost 100GB. My Work folder is around the same size. Installs folder, where I keep all old (and new) software versions, just under 300GB. Video is totally nuts.

I could certainly use 2GB free storage for important stuff, but I can already do that with my website, with the advantage that if I want to let someone else have access I send them the link. And gmail has almost 3GB of free storage. Or I can keep stuff on my two 16GB thumbdrives (which saved me a lot of grief in this latest crash).

Paying $10 a month for 50GB doesn't sound like much money, but when you start adding up all the little things each that don't cost much, they end up eating all my available funds. [sigh]

Hard drive space is about 6GB per dollar now. For effectively $10 I can have 60GB of hard drive space for the life of the drive. If use use RAID or a software backup or mirror then 60GB+safety is $20 for some unknown number of years. If I keep those drives offsite (at my folks') then the only advantage dropbox offer is convenience... which admittedly is still an important advantage: an inconvenient solution tends not to get used, no matter how useful it is.

Thanks for the link, David. I will think more on it. I tend not to make quick decisions, as you can see. :)