A computer shop owner once told me: "There are two kinds of hard drives. Those that have failed, and those that are going to fail."
That's really true. If you use a computer for 10 years or so, odds are high that you'll experience at least one hard drive failure. So don't put the data you care just on a hard drive. Personally I back up all my data to a second hard drive every night. When one of the drives fails, I run out and buy a new one to replace the dead one. The same thing goes for CDs, tapes, almost all media. Due to fluctuations in quality you will eventually get one that goes bad days after you take it out of the box, so always keep at least 2 copies of your data.
Ideally you'd have some storage medium that tells you that it's damaged, and that you should get the data off it now. I don't know of any such solutions, though I'm sure they exist if you're willing to spend the dough.
To be fair, I must say I believe now the failure was due to the firewire plug being removed while the drive was in operation. This is operator error.
I thought I would also give an update on the use of the GetDataBack software: after an extensive scan with the trial version, it was able to find all my data back. So kudos to the runtime company, I will get the full version for 80$ and be able to recover everything.
froody wrote:
A computer shop owner once told me: "There are two kinds of hard drives. Those that have failed, and those that are going to fail."
That's really true. If you use a computer for 10 years or so, odds are high that you'll experience at least one hard drive failure.
Tim
I’ve owned several computers at home since 1995, not to mention the dozens at work, and have never experienced a HD failure. Maybe I’m due. I’ve never been good about backing up. I’ve got all my photos except for the most recent, on two HD’s. The second HD was to free up space on my main HD, the Maxtor will be to back important stuff up. Hopefully, if or when one goes, everything will be backed up on the other drive, and I just replace the one that dies.
I had a 250GB Maxtor external fail within a few months of purchase. Even fancy data recovery software couldn't retrieve anything useful. After full reformatting, it was put back into use. Then Windows XP apparently decided one day to change the drive letter assigned to it. The data are still accessible, but I trust these things less than ever. Why would a drive letter suddenly change?!
DVD backup seems the way to go. Too bad it takes so long and completely ties up the computer while it's being done.
I've been using hard drives extensively for 18 years now (first one was a 20 MEGAbyte drive for $750) and I've had two fail. I run them 24 hours a day and both failed from what I term "centrifigal migration;" that is, the tendancy of the recording coating on the platters to eventually move to the outer portions of the disk, making that portion just slightly thicker than the rest of the disk. Eventually, the read/write head gets hung up on this area.
Both have failed after about 2.5 years of constant use. Accordingly, I consider any hard drive a temporary medium, especially after two years of use.
Backup, backup, backup. For me, it's a regimen of:
1) Daily backups of critical data to another physical drive in my computer, and
2) Backup of that backup to an alternating pair of external hard drives, one of which is kept off-site
3) Weekly backup of critical data to CD and/or DVD, dept off-site and archived in case data from, say, six months prior, needs to be loaded.
I expect my Mirra unit within days and that device will mirror my main computer as an additional layer of backup.
My backup regimen takes about 5 minutes each day. The cost of my backup equipment -- external hard drives and now the Mirra -- is about $600. The time and money expended is cheap compared to the absolute horror of trying to salvage lost data. I can't even imagine losing my photos, much less accounting data, emails, address/phone number lists and even my Favorites.
Update -- received my Mirra (www.mirra.com) backup computer yesterday and got it installed today.
Out of the box, installation is simple: connect the supplied ethernet cable to an open position on the router/switch and connect the other end to the Mirra "computer." Plug in the power cord and let it boot itself for about two minutes.
On my WindowsXP machine, install their software and flag the folders that need mirroring. That's it...
It works in the background, maintaining up to eight backups of any files that change or are added to the flagged folders. It's a physically separate unit from my computer and mine is located in the downstairs closet where our house's ethernet patch panel is located.
For example, I have a folder that contains all my images. It is flagged for backup. Any changes made to an image in the folder or it's subfolders gets backed up. Any images added to the folder or it's subfolders gets backed up (ie, downloading a new folder of images).
$399 + $25 freight for peace-of-mind. Ever had a hard drive fail? $424 is cheap for being able to immediately recover the day's work or sometimes just being able to return to a previous version of a file.
While it's not a substitute for off-site backup, it serves for daily backups and also for gracefully recovering from user errors such as overwriting an original photo file, etc..
Added bonus is that when I'm on-the-road, I can access my backed up files via the internet. Haven't tried this yet, but it is bound to be useful. One con: you can't upload to your computer while on the road (wouldn't that be an awesome feature though...).
I too have just had a HD failure last Sunday. I had a 120 GB drive added to the 30 GB that came with the system. The 120 lasted 10 months and the 30 is still going from 2001! I used it in the morning then in the afternoon I couldn't find the "D" drive anywhere, only the "C" drive. There was no warning of any type, no noises, etc I had a 200 GB drive installed last nigth and I'm going to take the 120 in to see if they can retrive anything from it, but I did have all my master images on DVD's using Archive Creator. It truly is a sobering moment when you realize that everything is gone in a flash. So as everyone else is saying; back-up, back-up, back-up!
I have two copies of my photos. One on DVDs and the other external HD. I have a third set of JPEG files to lookup the photos with on HD on my PC. I do not know why people are buying those external HD like I seen from Maxtor. I bought an external HD kit from Newegg.com that has Firewire and USB 2.0 and bought 120 GB Maxtor HD for it. It was far cheaper than buying the Maxtor external drive.
As of now no backup system is 100% reliable. I think the best bet is to have two backup systems of different media's and hope for the best. Actually I start to us external HD because I thought incase of a fire, I not going to grab a huge stack of DVD but my external HD.
Also I do not make a living off my photographers. If a did one set of my photos would not be in my house.
I had a Maxtor 250 gig external drive fail two weeks ago. It was also about six months old.
In addition my slightly older Maxtor 80 gig external drive just failed last week.
I understand this is a prevalent problem due to the plastic casing not dissipating the heat. In their favor, Maxtor quickly replaced the drive, but I'm concerned that after paying over $300. for one drive and $180. for the other drive they're not going to last past the one year warranty.
The newer drives have an aluminum case to dissipate heat.
That's one of the advantages of having a HD that is too small....... I only have a 40GB HD, and every time I want to download new images, I need to burn a batch to CD. I need to get another HD to expand my scratch disk space in photoshop, but I'm thinking it will make me sloppy with my backup.
You probably don't want to hear this but somthing similar happened to me. I'm usually good a t backing up data, but this hard drive was less than a year old. I sent the hard drive to Advanced Data Solutions, just south of San Diego. It cost me 600.00 but they recovered all of my data (.tiffs and jpegs). Whew! Worth the price. Now I have stacks and stacks of CD's. www.adv-data.com
I went through the nightmare of WD and Maxtor external drives.. what utter garbage. My WD failed in less than a month, and Maxtor could never sustain DV capture transfer rates over a Firewire connection (Oxford 911 Chipset on a 7200RPM drive for crying out loud!). I finally moved to a LaCie 7200RPM, 120GB Firewire drive and have not looked back since. The drives come in solid, professional looking metal enclosures that dissapate heat well, and also are powered externally. (Bus powered drives are almost pointless..)
I also try to burn DVD backups when I can, though this takes forever on my 1X drive. Still worth it I suppose in the face of data loss. Doubly important since my main computer often goes travelling with me.
not going to last past the one year warranty.