moxie grrl Loc: Tennessee

Hi Everyone! Went through the various forums & couldn't find anything appropriate to post, so I'm leaving this here. If it's the wrong forum, I apologize in advance.

Hoping someone has some useful suggestions... I have a Windows computer (Win 10). It has multiple drives & back ups. Nothing works for very long before I start having issues. This has been an ongoing problem now for over three years.

I have an offsite backup (Backblaze - hasn't worked). A back up system here at home (isn't backing up to the actual drives). And I have a couple of external drives (a portable 4 terabyte drive from Seagate was purchased last July & is already having issues). My husband is a recently retired computer tech (built my computer several years ago), & he is stumped that nothing seems to be working. We're both extremely frustrated. He asked me to post here. I am not a techie, although I can usually work things out. I know I am over my head with this problem. He doesn't like working on my computer anymore (retired, & wants to enjoy life, not babysit & trouble shoot my computer or its issues).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

htbrown Loc: San Francisco Bay Area

You've listed three issues:
1. Backblaze does not work
2. Your local backup system does not work
3. Your external drives do not work.
Your only description for all three is that they do not work. That does not give anyone much to go on. A better description of the issues is in order.

However, based on what little info we have, I would start with:
a. Contact the Backblaze folks. I do not use Backblaze but they seem like a responsive outfit. It seems likely they could help you work through the Backblaze issues.
b. Check the state of your USB ports. If they don't work, neither will external drives or whatever backup system writes to them.

tcthome Loc: NJ

agree on the local external storage. Do the external drives even show?

Dave327 Loc: Duluth, GA. USA

This is a little off the wall - replace the battery on the motherboard. My was acting weird and that cleared the problem.

df61743 Loc: Corpus Christi, TX

If your budget allows it, the sentence above gives me reason to suggest taking a look at a Synology NAS RAID enclosure, and I would suggest populating it with WD Ultrastar Data Center drives.

I have a DS418 4-bay enclosure with a pair of 10TB drives and a pair of 12TB drives, each pair configured in RAID1 mode. With the Synology software, I can select and folders on my computer to instantly be mirrored on the 10TB drives. The "master" copies of my photo negatives, my music collection, and various other files are saved on the 12TB drives. The RAID configuration protects you from data loss upon a disk failure of any one drive of each pair. The DS418 is ethernet connected to my router, making the data stored on it available to any computer on my network.

You might ask your husbands advice about Network Attached Storage and RAID. You can check it out on Synology's web site or at B&H Photo.

Dick

moxie grrl Loc: Tennessee

Hi Dick, I am Bob, her retired husband. just to address some of the things you suggested. I did get a NAS box with 2 WD red drives running raid 1. The box seems to be fine, but the ASUSTOR software does not seem to get the job done. It somehow changes the back up to local drives on her computer.

She runs a high volume of large (D-500) jpg and NEF files, probably 200 fotos a week give or take. We have burned through 5 or 6 drives in the last 3 years. All of the USB ports are working as far as I can tell. What usually happens is corruption of the files which turns into a nightmare of recovery from backblaze or local drives. The problem I have at the moment is a corrupted recycle folder on the external drive where her photos are kept. It wont let me fix or delete it. I end up having to do some administrative fix to the permissions to move forward. All very time consuming for me and frustrating for her.
Bob

df61743 Loc: Corpus Christi, TX

Sounds like you're ahead of me Bob. I have no experience with ASUSTOR, but I can affirm the software that comes with the Synology is superb. It's so reliable that I haven't been tempted to experiment with alternatives.

Maybe look at Good Sync, SyncBack, or something like that?

Outside of using the Synology software to back up selected computer folders, I just access it like any other external drive, and "drag and drop" to it.

Dick

moxie grrl Loc: Tennessee

yes, we ran a windows repair and it seems to be responding now. Working on a backup now

df61743 Loc: Corpus Christi, TX

Thumbs up!

Dick

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Welcome to my world!

I recently had trouble, and the computer itself suggested doing a Recovery, which led to a Reset. With a few clicks, it reinstalled Windows, with no action required from me. I have also done a re-install directly from the Microsoft Windows disk. That will get you back to the new computer state.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, Synology Syncback has worked for me for years.

SonyBug

Hi Bob,
I just went thru days of a computer fix for win10 corruption. Here is what happened.
I had a win10 machine configured with raid1 with two 1.5TB drives. Fortunately I had just backed up all photos, music, and docs to an external disk. Then I merged all the jpg files with the laptop so those were secure.
Here is where the fun started. Win10 went thru a update that crashed. Everything got locked up. Could not reboot, could get into the OS setup though, so finally I uncoupled the raid. I thought then I could really hard reset one of the drives and could then read the second to find the software, etc. Nope. That did not work. Finally, I was able to use a Win10 original disk and boot up one drive, but it lost every single file on the drive. But at least one drive was working. I never was able to find a way to get the system to recognize the second drive without resetting the volume. Well, that erased that drive too. So, all that money for a raid system was just out the window. I believe that my original problem was in some corrupted files in windows, because now the system operates just fine.
I no longer use raid. I use the second drive as a data drive and the primary as a system and app drive.
I have also written a batch file to do various backups and it runs from the task scheduler. It took awhile to figure that out, but all my computers now use that system and they are backed up in the most efficient manner.

My suggestion. Copy all of your data and program files to offsite storage. Erase and reformat the primary and secondary drives. Re install Win and perform all the upgrades. Then put your program files back along with the data (pictures etc).

Good Luck

home brewer Loc: Fort Wayne, Indiana

I had many problems on my old computer such as slow boot sudden lockup with only 8 gig of ram and full drives. The new computer has a faster i7 processor and an overkill of 64 gig and the old computer drive was cloned to the new; so i did not need to reinstall most of the software.
That said my guess is your computer is full of processes that are slowing it down.
Has your internet bogged down?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Just curious - were you using the Windows OS to generate the RAID 1 (mirrored) set, or an external RAID controller?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

When you say you have “burned through” 5 or 6 drives what does that mean? Did the drives actually have a HW failure, or did the data become corrupted? Also, do these problems always occur on external or remote drives, or do you get corrupted data on the internal boot drive as well? If the corruption also happens on the internal drive as well, is it configured as a basic or a dynamic drive in Windows storage manager? Finally, have you tried a different backup application such as Windows built-in backup manager or GoodSync?