External hard drive death! - Page 2

crusher · 28th March 2008, 8:52pm

Quote:

That's not much use if your house burns downs / floods / gets burgled, etc.

Oh yeah I forgot cuz like that happen every 3 months to me as well !
hahahah only joking yeah of course its better to do an offline offsite backup but that also costs cash but I must admit I didnt read the OP properly as it mentioned an external drive and I was thinking internal.
To be honest in the last like 20 years I only twice had a drive that couldnt be recovered by software even when it seems like theyre fucked theyre recoverable believe me its a dificult process to explain how to recover a drive its something you gotta try yourself but if the data is worth more than £700 then get it done in a cleanroom then - forget this stuff like take it apart in a plastic bag - forget that because drives will screw up if theyre taken apart and recovered in a normal atmosphere

warpbackspin · 29th March 2008, 9:27am

RAID has saved me many times.

I mirror everything & backup to DLT.

Fren · 29th March 2008, 2:01pm

Personally, I'm a little wary of actively backing up data in RAID sets. Yes, it saves your data if a hard drive fails, but if you manage to corrupt files and want to revert back to a previous version from an earlier date from backup, then this isn't possible, because the backed up/mirrored files will also be corrupt.

**Shannow** · 29th March 2008, 2:07pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreatKingRat

So what do you guys all use to back up?

Non bargain bin dvds, burned at the slowest speed, and verified after the burn.

Zero · 29th March 2008, 4:13pm

I have a automatic weekly hard drive image backup from my laptop to an external HD using SuperDuper.

For 'important' stuff I do a remote backup to Amazon S3 (via JungleDisk). I've got about 5GB backup up this way, and it costs under £1 per month.

For 'media', i.e. mostly music and TV shows, I use Verbatim DVD-Rs. I know that even if a disc get corrupted, I can almost always download the stuff again from somewhere so it's not a disaster.

warpbackspin · 29th March 2008, 9:17pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fren

Personally, I'm a little wary of actively backing up data in RAID sets. Yes, it saves your data if a hard drive fails, but if you manage to corrupt files and want to revert back to a previous version from an earlier date from backup, then this isn't possible, because the backed up/mirrored files will also be corrupt.

What?

If you want to backup multiple images of a drive, by date, to a RAID system, then do that.

Or do you mean relying on RAID with no backup?

Fren · 29th March 2008, 9:27pm

The latter. I mean relying on a raid set which is set up in a way that all the data on your primary hard-drive is 'actively' copied on a second hard drive, the instance data is created, deleted or altered. I just mean if it's not set up right you can end up with problems

warpbackspin · 29th March 2008, 9:33pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fren

The latter. I mean relying on a raid set which is set up in a way that all the data on your primary hard-drive is 'actively' copied on a second hard drive, the instance data is created, deleted or altered. I just mean if it's not set up right you can end up with problems

Mirroring is a fantastic thing. I would never put important data on a single drive anymore.

But it isn't backup.

Mistaking RAID for backup does definately get people into trouble, but if you can afford to do both, that's ideal.

**Shannow** · 29th March 2008, 9:38pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zero

I have a automatic weekly hard drive image backup from my laptop to an external HD using SuperDuper.

For 'important' stuff I do a remote backup to Amazon S3 (via JungleDisk). I've got about 5GB backup up this way, and it costs under £1 per month.

For 'media', i.e. mostly music and TV shows, I use Verbatim DVD-Rs. I know that even if a disc get corrupted, I can almost always download the stuff again from somewhere so it's not a disaster.

I found a program that will read corrupted disks and get the data back off them, saved my arse a few times with it.
CD roller, it was called.

Fren · 29th March 2008, 9:40pm

yeah thats what i was trying to get at haha. anyways, yeah, i've known people to set up a Raid set to get the advantage of the faster transfer rates and thinking it's a good backup solution aswell. Myself, i have a third sata hard drive which i keep regular backups on (my music, my documents, pictures etc...) every fortnight or so. Always have and hasn't failed me yet!

**PapaZeb** · 30th March 2008, 1:42am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shannow

I found a program that will read corrupted disks and get the data back off them, saved my arse a few times with it.
CD roller, it was called.

We use TestDisk (google it, it's free) at work on about 90% of the corrupted externals we get in with good success rates. (the other 10% are usually just a chkdsk to repair faults). One of the few free data recovery tools that I find quite useful.

For free backups, Cobian does zip or encrypted zip packages to FTP or network locations - for my personal machine I keep the important stuff synched up to an SCP server I've got through my webhost (who then do tape backups of everything)
For work, all of our data is backed up frequently to a NAS with RAID with multiple backup sets (ie, a nightly backup, then a weekly backup is pulled out of rotation for X months) - the truly important stuff is then further backed up offsite over the same SCP server setup I use personally (SCP or SFTP in preference to FTP for security purposes)

MarkMono · 30th March 2008, 3:25am

Quote:

Originally Posted by PapaZeb

We use TestDisk (google it, it's free) at work on about 90% of the corrupted externals we get in with good success rates. (the other 10% are usually just a chkdsk to repair faults).

100% success rate, I'd use these guys.

crusher · 30th March 2008, 11:20pm

Quote:

Personally, I'm a little wary of actively backing up data in RAID sets. Yes, it saves your data if a hard drive fails, but if you manage to corrupt files and want to revert back to a previous version from an earlier date from backup, then this isn't possible, because the backed up/mirrored files will also be corrupt.

Huh????? But the point of a raid array is that the data is written in stripes across the drives so that if one drive fails the data on the other drives can be interrogated and a mathematical process begins which recreates the data on the failed drive based on the data that is implied by the other drives in the set. you can set up 4 drives in two mirrors or two drives in combination

The whole point of raid arrays is that the likelihood that one drive will fail totally is high very very high compared to two failing at the same time or 4

A raid array will let you exactly recreate any disk because the data that is still present implies the data that is missing - its got to be better than relying on one drive to get you through - besides any good backup scheme will do an offline backup to tape or a usb drive that can be kept offsite