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

[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. :)