A lesson on the importance of backups...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Have you ruled out a virus?

Yes, I'm 99% sure it's hardware - nothing external. Tried scanning the drive for errors on two different PCs and it scans most of the drive fine, then finds an area of the drive where it's constantly re-seeking, and then fails.

[Katsunami]

I've learned this lesson about 20 years ago, when the 250MB hard disk of my 80486DX2 failed. I had no backups, except for the latest few files I needed for school. I lost many save games and thus, tens, maybe hundreds of hours of progress that day

In my defense, back then making backups was very expensive, requiring either a second drive in a caddy, or a tape streamer. Or, 200 floppies....

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by ApK

My instincts say stay with the most proven reliable tech for backups.

If nothing else, with SSDs, you are paying a premium for speed. That's not really a prime concern for backups, so let SSDs get their long term field testing done where they do the most good.

That being said, SSDs made for constant operation in a computer have to be at least as reliable as a USB flash drive, so it that's what you were going to use for backup anyway.....

The most proven reliable tech can fail - my 2TB Seagate GoFlex external drive used to be dead. Been sitting around for almost a year now. This thread made me wonder if it may not have been a glitch on my part. The drive is a usb 3.0 capable drive with the usb 3.0 cord along with it. My computer only has usb 2.0 as well as the old computer that went belly up shortly after the external drive complained about errors. So I tried a brand new usb 2.0 cord today. It took a little bit for my computer to be ready to read from it, but it is working now. I am getting about 19MB/s on average read speed which is what I would reasonably expect over usb 2.0. The last time I tried to copy the data off of it it usually failed after hanging at a few hundred bytes per second.

Sometimes even the cheapest little silly thing can fail - in this case a cable.

Yay, 36 GB of data which was previously considered lost is back.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

How are SSD compared to HDD concerning safety of backups? Or are they still to new for any reliable long term data?

As Zhou Enlai apparently told Dr. Henry Kissandtell - "Probably too soon to tell."

But heres a good indepth on HDD v SSD ==>> SSD vs. HDD: What's the Difference?. HDD longevity is better and its costs are way better. Speed and Quiet SSD's major advantages.

Zhou was answering a question from Henry, "So Mr. Premier what are your thoughts on the French Revolution"

I think that came from Vanity Fair. The glossy one, not the novel, AFAIK Henry never knew Thackeray, even if he did he'd have already made up a story of plausible deniability.

BR

[Demingy]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The most proven reliable tech can fail - my 2TB Seagate GoFlex external drive used to be dead. Been sitting around for almost a year now. This thread made me wonder if it may not have been a glitch on my part. The drive is a usb 3.0 capable drive with the usb 3.0 cord along with it. My computer only has usb 2.0 as well as the old computer that went belly up shortly after the external drive complained about errors. So I tried a brand new usb 2.0 cord today. It took a little bit for my computer to be ready to read from it, but it is working now. I am getting about 19MB/s on average read speed which is what I would reasonably expect over usb 2.0. The last time I tried to copy the data off of it it usually failed after hanging at a few hundred bytes per second.

Sometimes even the cheapest little silly thing can fail - in this case a cable.

Yay, 36 GB of data which was previously considered lost is back.

Now you have me thinking and wondering if there is newer technology that may be able to read more off my "bad" backups. I still have the drives, I think I'll look into this......

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by Demingy

Now you have me thinking and wondering if there is newer technology that may be able to read more off my "bad" backups. I still have the drives, I think I'll look into this......

Don't spend too much money (more than the data is worth to you). There is (and has been for quite a while) professional (read expensive as hell) data recovery services that can save data of off hard drives that been partially in a fire.

[Tarana]

I'm not that organized. I just drag what I need to back up over and let it copy. I can't figure out those backup programs. I also keep a list on my backup external of all the programs I've purchased and where I got them. It mostly duplicates what is saved in Yahoo folders, but that's fine. All my keycodes and stuff are available to reinstall.

[soulfuldog]

@ eschwartz, did you post instructions on how to use task scheduler in Windows to automatically save any changes to a certain folder (like your Dropbox folder) at one point? I'm sure I had something like this set up but just checked and my local back-up hasn't been updated since October, so something has went wrong!

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, I'm 99% sure it's hardware - nothing external. Tried scanning the drive for errors on two different PCs and it scans most of the drive fine, then finds an area of the drive where it's constantly re-seeking, and then fails.

Bad Sectors. Definitely hardware failure. I had drives do that. I actually patched one of them using a Partition Manager and a reallocating sectors program this was before hard drives became cheap enough to just replace.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Bad Sectors. Definitely hardware failure.

Yes, exactly that.

At least it's given me the excuse to replace my 1TB backup drive with a 2TB drive, which is something I would have needed to do soon anyway, because my iTunes library has now nearly filled the older drive (I record a lot of BBC Radio drama). I paid less for the replacement 2TB drive than I paid originally for the 1TB.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, exactly that.

At least it's given me the excuse to replace my 1TB backup drive with a 2TB drive, which is something I would have needed to do soon anyway, because my iTunes library has now nearly filled the older drive (I record a lot of BBC Radio drama). I paid less for the replacement 2TB drive than I paid originally for the 1TB.

Progress indeed. I understand the 1st CD drives were very expensive to buy.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by crich70

Progress indeed. I understand the 1st CD drives were very expensive to buy.

The prices I paid for computer-related optical drives were as follows:

1995: 2x CDROM drive, € 136 (back then, fl. 300)
1998: 40x CDROM drive, € 113 (fl. 250)
1998: 6x/4x CDRW-burner, € 317 (fl. 700)
2002: 4x/4x DVDRW / 40x/16 CDRW-burner, €200

Since then, I've bought many optical drives, all DVDRW-burners, with steadily decreasing price. The latest was a DVDRW-burner for €20 to replace a defective one, and a €69 Blu-Ray burner (so I'll be able to rip American Blu-Ray discs to ISO, and re-burn them onto a blank disc, to get rid of the region encoding. Sad that I have to do this, but some movies I want to have are just not released in Europe.)

My first hard drive replacement, somewhere in 1995 or so cost around fl. 800 for the new hard drive and a new IO-controller (my old one couldn't take that 'huge' 450 MB new drive); now I buy 500GB at less than €40 (which would have been fl. 88) in the Netherlands. That is 1000x (and more) the storage capacity for around 10% of the old price.

[ebusinesstutor]

In addition to making backups, it is critical that your backups be stored off-site.

A friend of mine had their laptop stolen as well as the external hard drive they used for backups. Years of irreplaceable family photos lost.

Think fire, flood damage, theft, etc. in addition to hard drive failure.

I backup 4 computers in our household to the cloud using Crashplan. Set and forget for under $15 per month and the backups are done daily. Running backups on 4 computers on even a weekly basis would take me hours each week. My time is valuable to me so the $15 per month is well spent.

[jaytheking2530]

i think i need to start backing up. thanks

[wizwor]

You're not betting on a disk to last forever. Your bet is that both disks do not fail at the same time. Absent a fire or burglary in your home, you method is likely to be very successful. Of course, if your sync is complete, and you remove the files from the source, they will be deleted from the destination. Also, check the logs or at least the dates on your backed up files to ensure your backups are happening.

I also use sync toy and inexpensive, low profile usb flash drives to back up important files from our laptops.



It's always best to keep a copy of your important files off your premises and files that include personal data should be encrypted on and off your PC.

Originally Posted by HarryT

I back up all my important files (Calibre library, iTunes library, personal documents, etc) once a week onto an external USB drive using the very good (and free) Microsoft "SyncToy" tool. Today, when I ran the backup, it got half way through the scan in which it decides which files have changed, and hence need copying, and then failed with an error. Investigation revealed a seemingly irrecoverably corrupt file system on the external drive: presumably the result of a hardware failure, given that I'm scrupulous in correctly dismounting drives.

I'm now in the process of doing a sync to a new external drive to create a new backup.

Just goes to prove the old maxim, that there are two types of hard disk: those that have failed, and those which are about to fail!

I haven't lost any data, but it shows the importance of doing regular backups, and that backup drives themselves can (and do) fail.