Has a backup saved your bacon?
Aug 29, 2014 10:09:02 #
Capture48 wrote:
HD makers still use MTBF, they simulate the years of use very easily. Same as your car tire makers simulate miles and miles or use. Same way they test camera shutters. Perhaps it might be better to say they compress 11 years of use down to a few months.
When they do, it's more a marketing strategy than a technical specification. As one who has spent over 30 years in the technology field, MTBF is a number that is meaningless to me.
Capture48 wrote:
But I agree all mechanical devices fail at some point
And that's the key.
Aug 29, 2014 10:11:36 #
Just Fred wrote:
And that's the key.
marketing...probably, but it does put the customer on notice that they bought a device that will fail.
Aug 29, 2014 10:12:29 #
Computer guy here. Have seen clients that don't heed my advice lose everything, then want to blame everyone but themselves, but they do get religion about backups after that. I recently had a scare where Windows 8.1 on my main business machine wouldn't boot and the best I could do was "Refresh", which means you lose all your programs but not your data. It was comforting to know I had external hard drives and Carbonite. Programs only took about a day and it's running like brand new. Short of a nuclear war, I'm covered. If there is a nuclear war, my stuff probably doesn't matter much anymore anyway...
Aug 30, 2014 06:27:32 #
When a hard drive fails, it's usually the controlling electronics rather than the disks. If you are lucky, you can get a similar drive at a much lower price and simply swap the pcb. Worth a try!
Aug 30, 2014 06:32:17 #
Backups have saved my bacon many times over the last 25 years. Hardrives eventually fail mechanically, file allocation tables become corrupted, bad sectors develop in the boot partition, etc. etc. I maintain systems for many non profits in my spare time and computers for family members and friends. I always implement redundant HDD's for backup and I have to say there have been dozens of instances over the years where I've used the backup HDD to bring systems back to life and replace archived folders. I'd say if you've been using desktop computers or laptops for as long as many of the participants here, you are just lucky if haven't had to restore a system and files from a backup. Frankly given the low cost of high capacity HDD's there is no excuse for not using redundant back up drives no matter how you decide to implement them: NAS RAID array, Hot swapable drives in drawers or external caddies as a first line of defense and then a cloud based backup as a second line of defense. I prefer NAS arrays as they use a resident OS that controls the drives and puts drives to sleep unless an actual read or write command is directed to the drive. Having drives that sleep in a mirrored array ensure that HDD's last for many, many years and the mirror is your second line of defense against loss. Most NAS devices allow for hot swap drive replacement and automatically rebuild the RAID array when you insert a new drive. The OS for many NAS devices can be set up to send you an email if a drive develops problems or fails.
Aug 30, 2014 07:10:28 #
dsmeltz wrote:
The topic of backups shows up frequently here. Usually it starts with a question from someone who did not backup or is trying to set up a system. In the replies, often things like the following are said: It isnt if a drive will fail, but when!; you could loose all of your work if you don not backup! or You must backup locally and off-site!!
Anything else?
Anything else?
I've been using hard drives since they became available. The only one that failed was an external that fell to the floor while doing a backup. Still, hard drives do fail.
I've spent an awful lot of money on backups, but it is good piece of mind. The only time I've needed a backup is for individual files or my Quicken files.
I now backup to to two external drives and one NAS. My 1TB externals have gotten too small, so I use 2TB and 4TB.
Aug 30, 2014 07:20:39 #
As to the suggestion about swapping PCB's on HDD's. This not for the faint of heart or inexperienced. Typically only drive recovery experts do this and most have an electrical engineer on staff. While I've tried to swap PCB drive control circuits and typically failed Every drive manufacturer uses proprietary circuitry. So, don't do it. If you need to have a drive recovered due to PCB failure or a crashed read/write head send it off to a recovery service and they will remove the disk platen and put it a working drive to recover files. Avoid this situation altogether and back up to another HDD on a scheduled basis. Drive recovery is usually a very expensive endeavor.
Aug 30, 2014 07:27:54 #
DavidPine
Loc: Fredericksburg, TX
I've had several PC's fail. One last year. I had a 1TB Seagate fail and Seagate quickly replaced it for free. I'm fortunate that I use 4 external hard drives with one dedicated for backups and the others for file storage (photos). I have several on line storage accounts like dropbox and adobe cloud but I don't use them.
Aug 30, 2014 07:48:49 #
C.R.
Loc: United States of Confusion
only had drive failures at work, restored from tape that did a complete backup every night. only drives i've ever replaced for failure in other peoples equipment have been seagate. yeah, seagate replaces them but that doesn't do much good when all the data is lost.
external drives in those "cute" little enclosures is asking for failure. heat is your enemy in the computer world. i use medium to large WD drives with the black label. boot drive is SSD. use an older 2TB WD green drive pulled from one of those "cute" enclosures as an internal backup for important stuff.
have an older quad core computer i'll likely turn into my own home cloud, use 3 or 4 1TB drives in a raid 5 configuration
external drives in those "cute" little enclosures is asking for failure. heat is your enemy in the computer world. i use medium to large WD drives with the black label. boot drive is SSD. use an older 2TB WD green drive pulled from one of those "cute" enclosures as an internal backup for important stuff.
have an older quad core computer i'll likely turn into my own home cloud, use 3 or 4 1TB drives in a raid 5 configuration
Aug 30, 2014 07:49:59 #
Capture48 wrote:
HD makers still use MTBF, they simulate the years of use very easily. Same as your car tire makers simulate miles and miles or use. Same way they test camera shutters. Perhaps it might be better to say they compress 11 years of use down to a few months.
But I agree all mechanical devices fail at some point
But I agree all mechanical devices fail at some point
Electronic devices fail too! Says he after looking at a server thats not posting yesterday. Discovered a ram module with half its contacts missing and 3 swollen caps near the ram banks. The raid drives are ok thou.
Hard drives are a bit like engines you get to know how they should sound and a change in sound is a big red flag. Solid state can just not work with no warning at all.
Aug 30, 2014 08:03:21 #
Yup electrolytic and polymer capacitors fail with some regularity. I've pulled lots of Mac's in particular out of the scrap heap only to find failed capacitors on the motherboard. $2.00 worth of capacitors and your back in business, unless the moment of capacitor failure voltage spike happened to fry something else in the pathway. Your lucky the DIMM took the hit. Most HDD's have pico fuses that will protect the HDD from failure, but most folks don't have the skills to desolder pico fuses or SM fuses from PCB's and fix the drive. Bottom line is electronic circuits fail especially in tightly packed enclosures that are not well cooled by vents and fans. This is all boring, eyes glazed over stuff to the average computer user; the take away is implement redundant backup solutions.
Aug 30, 2014 08:06:35 #
C.R. wrote:
I use medium to large WD drives with the black label.
have an older quad core computer i'll likely turn into my own home cloud, use 3 or 4 1TB drives in a raid 5 configuration
have an older quad core computer i'll likely turn into my own home cloud, use 3 or 4 1TB drives in a raid 5 configuration
The WD Black drives are always my first choice.
A Synology NAS makes a good home cloud - with WD Red drives.
Aug 30, 2014 09:31:28 #
I have a horror story to share that I hope will make you realize the importance of external backups and why I am obsessed with the subject.
To set the scene back in 1970 I was managing the IT department for an organization with 80 some odd locations. In those days we used mainframe computers equipped with removable disk drives and at the end of every weekly processing cycle we religiously backed up the current data to a different drive which we put in our 8 hour fire resistant vault. We kept the most recent two periods of data, each on its own disk, in the vault. For convenience we called these the father and the grandfather.
One night I received a phone call at 3 AM. It was the 3rd shift operator calling to tell me that he had backed up the grandfather to the current drive instead of backing up the current drive to the grandfather.
So, I told him to restore from the father and went back to sleep. An hour later another call. He couldn't recover the data from the father. So there I was with very old data on my system and no record of the transactions for the last two weeks. That included accounts receivable, inventory, sales, merchandise orders and payroll data.
Fortunately all of our input data was on punched cards (remember I am talking about 1970) and all of our input cards were in boxes in the warehouse.
It took us 72 hours of non-stop operation to recover our systems. In order to keep our 80 some odd locations in operation we just shipped them the same order as we had shipped the prior week. (Imagine the mess that caused in both the stores and the warehouse.)
Now to the present. I no longer have to worry about preserving business data and am only concerned about protecting my photos and personal data.
I do all of my photo work on one computer. Once a week I back up all of my data and images to an external drive which I then attach to a second computer and restore everything to the second computer. I also keep three generations worth of memory cards and rotate them.
Learn from my experience and backup to an external media on a regular basis and don't wipe out your memory cards until you know your backups have been backed up.
Jerry
To set the scene back in 1970 I was managing the IT department for an organization with 80 some odd locations. In those days we used mainframe computers equipped with removable disk drives and at the end of every weekly processing cycle we religiously backed up the current data to a different drive which we put in our 8 hour fire resistant vault. We kept the most recent two periods of data, each on its own disk, in the vault. For convenience we called these the father and the grandfather.
One night I received a phone call at 3 AM. It was the 3rd shift operator calling to tell me that he had backed up the grandfather to the current drive instead of backing up the current drive to the grandfather.
So, I told him to restore from the father and went back to sleep. An hour later another call. He couldn't recover the data from the father. So there I was with very old data on my system and no record of the transactions for the last two weeks. That included accounts receivable, inventory, sales, merchandise orders and payroll data.
Fortunately all of our input data was on punched cards (remember I am talking about 1970) and all of our input cards were in boxes in the warehouse.
It took us 72 hours of non-stop operation to recover our systems. In order to keep our 80 some odd locations in operation we just shipped them the same order as we had shipped the prior week. (Imagine the mess that caused in both the stores and the warehouse.)
Now to the present. I no longer have to worry about preserving business data and am only concerned about protecting my photos and personal data.
I do all of my photo work on one computer. Once a week I back up all of my data and images to an external drive which I then attach to a second computer and restore everything to the second computer. I also keep three generations worth of memory cards and rotate them.
Learn from my experience and backup to an external media on a regular basis and don't wipe out your memory cards until you know your backups have been backed up.
Jerry
Aug 30, 2014 10:27:21 #
C.R. wrote:
only had drive failures at work, restored from tap... (show quote)
Not sure I'd use RAID 5 for backing up photos, particularly if you're doing photo rectification to the RAID array in real time. The parity calculation overhead for RAID 5 an 6 come at a performance cost. Typically RAID 1 works just fine for photo back up and has greater performance if you're working directly with files stored on the array.
Aug 30, 2014 11:56:09 #
I have used Carbonite for years. I let it automatically back up my data. It rescued my data from 2 hard drive crashes. I had to purchase new computers. I can bring back my business software and photos first and it works in the background as the rest of the data is restored. That includes freeware and other downloads I had on my system. I have one external hard drive but probably don't need it. The cost breaks down to $6.67/month. Not too bad for total peace of mind.
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