Note to self: Back up your $*%t

[roadwreck]

I've never had a hard drive just totally die on me. In the past when things have started to go wrong I've always been able to recover the data myself. Come to think of it, I've never actually had one of my hard drives fail. It's always been friends or family that have come to me with corrupted drives.

The one that failed this time was in my wife's computer. Yes, we have his and hers computers. Actually we have multiple "his" computers. Not her choice, I'm sure she'd be much happier having just one computer in the house taking up space, but I digress. Two weeks ago, hers wouldn't boot. So I threw in the windows recovery cd, it didn't help. So I pulled the computer apart and hooked it up to one of my computers and booted into Linux. The drive is recognized but one of the partitions won't mount. I'm not computer guru, but I have been able to recover data from friends drives just by booting into Linux. So at this point I have to do a little more digging. I discover a program called gnu ddrescue, finally figure out how to get it set up and give it a go. It seems to be working pretty well and gets about 3GB into the drive before it just completely quits. Up until now I figured it was just a corrupted partition, but it seems the drive was physically failing and I think it took it's last gasp last night while running ddresuce.

I really can't think of anything on the drive that is all that important. Just pictures, but most of the really important ones (wedding, vacations, etc. are copied on disks somewhere else). Still, it stinks to think that their are those random snapshots that are probably gone forever. I don't think I'm willing to spend a couple hundred dollars (maybe more) to take the drive to a recovery place to see if they can do anything with it. I don't think there was anything that important on there.

What really gets me is that a little over a week before her drive crashed I made backups of all my computers, but not hers (b/c I'm not allowed to mess with it). What are the odds that out of the 7 hard drives we had running two weeks ago the only one to die would be the one I didn't copy.

doh!

 

[kevo_55]

Damn, that sucks!!

Computers are a nice tool when they work, a PITA when they crash.

 

[SSmith]

I have a server that automatically backs up all the computers on my network every night. Of course it is located in my house, so in cases of catastrophic events (fire, tornado, whatever), I still have lost everything.

There are online services that do this as well. Carbonite comes to mind. $50/yr to automatically backup your computers with no size limitations.

 

[Flyer_PE]

I keep everything backed up on two external drives. The external USB drives are getting cheap enough that I'm planning to buy a couple of 500Gb units and keep a periodic backup in our safe deposit box so a catastrophic event at the house won't take it all out. It's not like you can go back and retake pics of the kid when he was two.

 

[Supe]

I feel your pain. When Ike hit Houston last year, it not only wiped out my laptop hard drive, but it also took out the USB backup drive plugged into it (an older one that is not self powered by the USB port itself). I lost 7 years worth of pictures, school papers, articles, links, music, etc etc.

 

[SSmith]

All this talk is making me really consider an off-site option for backups.

 

[Master slacker]

There are online services that do this as well. Carbonite comes to mind. $50/yr to automatically backup your computers with no size limitations.

I just can't bear the thought of having all of my personal information, data, files, etc... out there on a server. Encrypted or not, I couldn't do it.

 

[Road Guy]

we recently lost our external notebook hard-drive, 4 years of pictures we never made copies of..

probably going to try and send it off and get the data off of it but that doesnt appear to be cheap.... it does totally suck!

 

[Capt Worley PE]

You can get thumb drives that hold 32Gb pretty cheap. Which reminds me, I need to back up all our pics at the house.

 

[wilheldp_PE]

I bought a 1 TB usb hard drive enclosure, with two 500 GB drives stripe in RAID 1, a while back with grand schemes of backing up all 3 of my computers on a regular basis. I backed everything up right after I bought it, and haven't done so since. The hitch in my plan came with my expectation that Time Machine on my Macs and Windows backup in XP would allow me to schedule automatic backups to this drive that would be shared on my network. Turns out that Time Machine requires a dedicated drive, formatted in HTFS, in order to back up automatically. If I formatted the drive in HTFS, the Windows box wouldn't recognize it.

My new plan is to buy an HP MediaSmart server in the near future. HP Literature states, and user reviews back up, that it plays well with both Windows and Apple boxes, and it will easily share my photos, music, and movies among all computers in the house. That will be nice to not be taking up 16 GB of one of my computers with music, meanwhile being worried about losing all of it.

 

[csb]

Carbonite did not play well with our older laptop. It was a total resource hog. Haven't tried it with a faster machine, since the trial went so poorly on a different computer.

Our phone company handles our DSL and they offer us free backup. Haven't used it, but it's out there. I'm a giant external hard drive person myself. I've also been trying to actually print the pictures of my kid off.

 

[ElCid03]

I got screwed too about three weeks ago. The IT guy saved me after eight hours of effort, god bless him.

 

[IlPadrino]

Mozy works well for me... it's free and has a pretty robust scheduling option. If anyone is going to try it out, I'll post my "referral" info and we'll both get a little extra space.

 

[roadwreck]

Mozy works well for me... it's free and has a pretty robust scheduling option. If anyone is going to try it out, I'll post my "referral" info and we'll both get a little extra space.

How much extra space do you get for a referral? It seems like the free service is only for 2gb. That's not much.

I back my data up on an external drive periodically. The drive that failed was my wifes computer which I don't mess with unless something goes wrong with it. There was nothing on there that was so important that it's worth much effort to try and recover. It was mostly her pictures (and she's not much of a photographer so I don't see that as much of a loss). A 2 GB backup for her might be good though, since she can't be bothered to run a backup herself (or let me do it).

It's pretty sad that I'm actually kind of excited about this computer failure. It means I get to go computer shopping again. :eyebrows:

She'll get a brand spanking new computer and I'll get to pirate her old machine for parts and upgrade my machines.

Yes, I'm a dork.