Photoladybon wrote:
Within the past two months, I have had two separate Seagate External HD fail on me. Both were my main A vs B drives. Needless to say I did back up to a B drive but seem to have lost the last week's images because A did not backup to B via Chrono Sync despite receiving a report to the contrary.
I spoke with Seagate and they offered for me to return the less than 6 week old 8T drive to them and see if they could recover the images (thousands) but I had to provide a minimum of 30 days for them to keep the drive. They also sent me a recovery software which I am running right now but a full run is over 16 hours. I don't know how it will recover when I can't even get disk utility to read the drive as it remains unmounted and nothing I do can mount it. There's obviously a defect in the drive.
It cost me a few hundred dollars in professional time to get the other 8T backup after a corruption. It said I could copy and transfer but not save, so absolutely able to save those many thousands of images. The B drive continues to work well.
Now I have two 8T drives that don't work well and I need to rescue my images off the second one. If my attempts fail, I will send back (begrudgingly) to Seagate to see what they can do.
I have been using a Mac book pro approximately 6 years old running Monterrey. All the rest of the computer functions work including three other Seagate drives holding older images. I followed all steps recommended by Seagate to verify the intergrity of this HD (or non integrity??).
Has anyone else experienced this horrific situation and if so what was the resolution? And also, now, I'm looking for other suggestions/solutions/storage options. Looking to the Hogs for help. TIA.
Within the past two months, I have had two separat... (
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I've had several hard drive failures over the years. I've never lost data. I follow these rules:
1. Three copies of the data; original, online backup, offline backup.
2. Whenever a drive throws an error, it is replaced.
3. Offline backup swapped with online backup periodically for drive refresh.
4. Use only high quality drives (enterprise quality).
5. At least one drive is Raid 5 for self recovery.
6. Use drivers that report errors. This is important if you use Apple Mac computers, because the Mac OS doesn't do good drive monitoring.
My preference is SoftRAID for driver software and Raid management.
Not sure what types of drives you have. If you are using inexpensive Seagate drives, you quite likely have SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives. These are horrid, and have extremely poor performance after an initial write. They are suitable for archive purposes upon the first write, and very light update. But you don't want to reuse them due to the architecture. I have used them specifically for archive. If I need to rewrite, I buy a new drive and recycle the old. Be sure that any drives you get in the future are CMR. Seagate have been pushing SMR drives into their higher capacity systems, and have not been forthcoming about it.
As for you specific case; I don't know how ChronoSync could have completed a backup and had it disappear from the target drive. Unless the drive error on the source drive resulted in loss of data before the backup.
Seagate recovery software may go directly to the drive; usually a drive would be dismounted by the software even if it had been mounted by the operating system. The recovery software would not use the OS file system for recovery, as the damage to the drive most likely includes damage to the file system.
One thing you learn with high capacity systems is how long it takes to perform functions on the drives. Especially something like drive certification, which takes days to just do one or two passes.
I recommend you get a large capacity RAID system for one set of backups. I usually keep mine offline (except for a RAID system for video processing), and periodically swap them in for refresh whether I need to run a backup to them. And make sure all of your drives are high quality drives. They cost more (sometimes much more), but it's worth it in my opinion. What are you going to do if you lose your data?
One last thing; I keep most of my current work on my main work drive, which is backed up nightly. I then migrate that data as appropriate to other drives when I won't be accessing it as frequently. Those drives are backed up when data is migrated to them, which I do on an as needed basis. When the backup is completed, I swap with the second backup drives and repeat. At no time are all three drives plugged in at the same time.