Has a backup saved your bacon?
Aug 30, 2014 12:29:59 #
One drive....
The WD1600
Early Gb drive... 1.6 Gb... Massive Error on Western Digitals part. Always failed. At least every one I saw.
Every drive manufacturer has put one or more "horror stories" on the market. One for WD was the 1600.
Seagate has done so... Their 160 Gb SATA of about 6 years ago.
When drives broke into the terrabyte area, they were dying in droves for about a year.
Most notable laptop failure in my experience. HP DV2000, DV6000, and DV9000. Bad motherboard taking out many components, incl drives. At one time not so long ago, I just dumped 9 dead DV9000's, and a couple of DV2000's. The 9000's were $1500 plus laptops with bays for 2 hard drives. (the rate of failure is interesting, since I had 9 failures on one model in a community of 100,000 population).
Yes, every manufacturer puts out a component or a machine that stinks once in a while.
One person here indicated he is at peace because he has all his images stored on DVD.... HEY! CD's and DVD's are ROTTING... the sealing chemicals on the edges are just one of the reasons. Do a search on CD ROT or DVD ROT.
About a year ago, in Oklahoma City, two neighbors "off site" backup plan consisted of each keeping the others data stored at their homes. Both homes were lost on the same day in that Tornado that ripped Oklahoma City a "new one".
LaCerte Drives ... Hate 'em.
Redundancy, and only if the cloud is the last resort in a chain of three drives, one off site (not the Cloud), and enough money in your computer fund to buy a new drive and spend a weekend making yet another backup.
OK, paranoia is starting to set in, now.
The saying is NOT "if a hard drive will fail, but when"
The saying is "There are only two types of computer users, Those who have lost important data, and those who are Going To!
I've been consulting, building and teching on computers for 25 years (not so much building in the last 5 years).
A huge part of my work in that time has been data recovery.
I won't even go any farther than I have. Complacency about backups is the problem... not the equipment.
Redundancy and a regular plan for backups is the solution. If you don't have those two things in place, you are simply the second type of computer user... you're going to get hit with a data loss at some point, most likely because of your complacency, not your equipment. OTOH if you're using bad media.. CD's and DVD's would be among those, you are much closer to becoming the first type of computer user... lost data!
Now as far as the OP question my answer would be a resounding YES... backup plans have saved my ASS. In turn, I have recovered the data of any number of people who were in that complacent camp. In addition when many found out the time and cost of such a recovery, it's amazing how many simply said... "Oh, that's OK the stuff on the drive was not that important anyway. Just put in a new drive, load the OS and my programs.....OH wait, I don't own all my programs". Complacency.
Redundancy. 4 backups. Perhaps more.
The WD1600
Early Gb drive... 1.6 Gb... Massive Error on Western Digitals part. Always failed. At least every one I saw.
Every drive manufacturer has put one or more "horror stories" on the market. One for WD was the 1600.
Seagate has done so... Their 160 Gb SATA of about 6 years ago.
When drives broke into the terrabyte area, they were dying in droves for about a year.
Most notable laptop failure in my experience. HP DV2000, DV6000, and DV9000. Bad motherboard taking out many components, incl drives. At one time not so long ago, I just dumped 9 dead DV9000's, and a couple of DV2000's. The 9000's were $1500 plus laptops with bays for 2 hard drives. (the rate of failure is interesting, since I had 9 failures on one model in a community of 100,000 population).
Yes, every manufacturer puts out a component or a machine that stinks once in a while.
One person here indicated he is at peace because he has all his images stored on DVD.... HEY! CD's and DVD's are ROTTING... the sealing chemicals on the edges are just one of the reasons. Do a search on CD ROT or DVD ROT.
About a year ago, in Oklahoma City, two neighbors "off site" backup plan consisted of each keeping the others data stored at their homes. Both homes were lost on the same day in that Tornado that ripped Oklahoma City a "new one".
LaCerte Drives ... Hate 'em.
Redundancy, and only if the cloud is the last resort in a chain of three drives, one off site (not the Cloud), and enough money in your computer fund to buy a new drive and spend a weekend making yet another backup.
OK, paranoia is starting to set in, now.
The saying is NOT "if a hard drive will fail, but when"
The saying is "There are only two types of computer users, Those who have lost important data, and those who are Going To!
I've been consulting, building and teching on computers for 25 years (not so much building in the last 5 years).
A huge part of my work in that time has been data recovery.
I won't even go any farther than I have. Complacency about backups is the problem... not the equipment.
Redundancy and a regular plan for backups is the solution. If you don't have those two things in place, you are simply the second type of computer user... you're going to get hit with a data loss at some point, most likely because of your complacency, not your equipment. OTOH if you're using bad media.. CD's and DVD's would be among those, you are much closer to becoming the first type of computer user... lost data!
Now as far as the OP question my answer would be a resounding YES... backup plans have saved my ASS. In turn, I have recovered the data of any number of people who were in that complacent camp. In addition when many found out the time and cost of such a recovery, it's amazing how many simply said... "Oh, that's OK the stuff on the drive was not that important anyway. Just put in a new drive, load the OS and my programs.....OH wait, I don't own all my programs". Complacency.
Redundancy. 4 backups. Perhaps more.
Aug 30, 2014 12:38:37 #
I usually buy 7200 RPM Enterprise class Toshiba drives for NAS arrays where data transfer speed are not the most important factor. They spin more slowly, obviously, so they tend to wear out more slowly and the enterprise drives seem to never have problems with sleep and park commands, which is not always true for WD and Seagate consumer drives. I typically purchase remanufactured Toshiba enterprise drives and have never had any issues with longevity for the MA and MG series drives. They cost about 60% of new.
Aug 30, 2014 12:52:38 #
C.R.
Loc: United States of Confusion
bcmink wrote:
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.
yeah, but i'd get a larger array with 4 TB drives, the array will not be the working machine, just storage for the home network
Aug 30, 2014 14:46:00 #
dsmeltz wrote:
The topic of backups shows up frequently here. Us... (show quote)
I once had a virus completely wiping everything off my computer, luckily I had back-up, so I didn't loose anything.
Aug 30, 2014 14:59:13 #
I am the greatest danger to my own data.
Alas, yes, I have had to retrieve data from backup on more than one occasion and while infrequent, when needed, that backup "saved my bacon".
Alas, yes, I have had to retrieve data from backup on more than one occasion and while infrequent, when needed, that backup "saved my bacon".
Aug 30, 2014 20:30:15 #
dsmeltz wrote:
The topic of backups shows up frequently here. Us... (show quote)
I've lost a drive on two occasions and was glad to have a backup. In addition, I've lost an SD card after shooting. That cost me most of the day plus modeling fees. This has happened twice--not in the last several years though. It's one of the features of the D7000 that like. I can record to two cards at the same time.
Aug 30, 2014 21:52:50 #
I have never had a hard drive fail, I have always upgraded my computers before they failed. But I have had several instances where I had accidentally deleted files, or saved when I meant to save as, or otherwise just had files strangely disappear. I was able to retrieve all of them from my backups.
Aug 30, 2014 22:02:50 #
JohnSwanda wrote:
I have never had a hard drive fail, I have always upgraded my computers before they failed. But I have had several instances where I had accidentally deleted files, or saved when I meant to save as, or otherwise just had files strangely disappear. I was able to retrieve all of them from my backups.
Sounds like you, like me, are the greatest danger to your own data. :?
Glad you had backups.
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