Have a hard drive go bad lately?

This morning my archive drive wouldn't fire up. This is the drive that contains all of the editorial "pieces" that went into each issue of GRM and Classic Motorsports going back 20+ years--the pulled photos, story copy, revisions, notes, etc. Plus this drive has (had?) all of the editorial elements for other products like our wall calendars, race programs, etc.

Doh.

Fortunately I maintain an exact duplicate of this drive at home, and fortunately there's an Office Depot between home and work. A second drive has since been created and, yes, I have a feeling I'll be generating one more copy tonight. The contents of this drive will probably go to the cloud, too, eliminating a possible point of failure.

Whew.

had an older SCSI fail last year, maybe 8 years old.

It was just the OS as the other stuff was on a separate drive.

I've had a rash of HD failures lately. HD in DD#2's laptop crapped out and she had no decent backup. I was able to restore a backup that was about 9 months old, and used Disk Drill to make a dump of all her files into a semi-categorized mess. She's in the process of cleaning that up, but at least they are all still in existence.

Then the external HD I use as hourly backup for our main computer tanked. While I was trying to salvage that, the Iomega portable HD I was trying to use as a temporary target crapped out too. It's pissing me off.

DD#1 and DD#2 are getting small redundant RAID units for the holidays.

At least you have back-ups. Grumble...

My WD blue died unexpectedly. It has a lot of my son's baby pictures on it. I did not have a back up. Trying to recover the data somehow.

My sequencing data is stored locally in RAID 10 and rsynced nightly to a Synology in another room, which is rsynced nightly to university-provided storage off-site. The Synology can't see the computer and the computer can't see the off-site storage volume to keep things Bitlocker-resistant.

Yeah...

In reply to DuctTape&Bondo:

Depending on how bad it failed, the recovery price varies. The good news is pretty much everything is recoverable. The bad news is it might be like $2k to do it.

Ive never had a WD drive fail yet. Lots of Seagate failures, though. Maybe 5 seagates failed while all 6 or 7 WD drives ive purchased over the years still work. The only recent casualty was my wifes laptop as the result of a violent drop. I think it was some off brand drive but you cant fault the brand. It was quite an impact

DuctTape&Bondo wrote: My WD blue died unexpectedly. It has a lot of my son's baby pictures on it. I did not have a back up. Trying to recover the data somehow.

I used Disk Drill in that same situation. It salvaged all the files off a disk that was so dead nothing I had would mount it or even begin to repair it. It was impervious to my somewhat limited UNIX disk utility knowledge too. It had hundreds of pictures she had taken on it.

There is a free version of the program that will basically tell you what it will be able to recover. Then, if it looks like it will work, you pay $65 and it unlocks the full version to finish the recovery.

My home server seems to have a bad drive in its RAID array. They're just about two years old, the previous set lasted a good five years and survived being mistreated by some parcel service or other when I shipped the thing over from the UK.

Have to swap it out this week (fortunately it's one of five) but I still need to make a backup of that array first just in case.

had a series of DeskStars (Deathstars?) go down. I'd get 12-14 months out of them before they went Tango Uniform.

Had a WD640 black fail early this year. Have an old 150 that I used as a portable drive that is E36 M3ting the bed too.

Currently have fresh drives in my desktop & my WD External, but really need to get moving with the GRM Cloud Backup Group.

I lose a couple a year on the enterprise level. Granted, I have a few hundred.

Backblaze is a very easy to use cloud backup tool. It is also cheap. Like $5 per month. SWMBO sleeps better knowing her pictures are backed up every night.

I had a few close calls this year. Now everything goes on the computer that gets backed up.

Apparently the big cloud providers claim 13 nines of availability according to one of my OEMs that builds a pretty sweet cloud-backed bottomless NAS device. That means that your data is accessible 99.99999999999% of the time. The various on-prem storage vendors get all proud with five nines (99.999%) and sometimes try to claim 6. Encrypt it, hold your own keys, and make it somebody else's problem. Flash or trash.

That's the sort of stuff that gives your gut a flip, isn't it?

Had a big Seagate 4TB fail recently, if I'd been watching the SMART numbers more carefully I could've seen it coming, but I had a backup anyway. The price of replacing that one hurt.

This is a good thread in which to mention the backup group thread, if anyone hasn't seen it:

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/grm-cloud-backup-group/106690/page1/

BTW I think you guys at GRM should look into using Amazon Glacier for your "cloud" backup of the archive. Looks like a perfect fit for what you need.

I had a seagate laptop drive die last month, and a seagate 500GB desktop drive throw the warning flags this month. I also got a used imac with a dead WD 1TB drive in it.

I've been replacing them with Samsung SSD for OS drives and HGST for storage and whatever I have laying around for non-critical things.

I backup all of my photos to multiple online places.

Pretty sure google Drive gives you 16gigs per account for free. Not the most space ever, but it's typically enough for mission critical stuff

Speaking of storage, a little while ago JG replaced my laptop drive with an SSD. Wow. It's like VTEC.

David S. Wallens wrote: Speaking of storage, a little while ago JG replaced my laptop drive with an SSD. Wow. It's like VTEC.

Actually it's more like running a ton of boost, because it allows for great speed but also greatly increases the risk of sudden catastrophic failure. Don't skip those backups!

Recently picked up a huge HGST after losing two drives, then discovered I've got like 6 drives and only the power to run 3.

I need to do this RAID thing eventually.

You know the old saying, "RAID is not a backup." Is you're thinking about running RAID because you're worried about data loss, you're doing it wrong.

RAID is for availability and/or performance, and is never the best way to use drives if you're trying to keep your data safe.

So I'm better off just doing the classic clone of my main storage drive?

Yep for sure. That clone will save you from accidental deletion/malware, power surges, and filesystem damage, which RAID won't do anything for.