Roadrunner

I had an 80 Gig Western Digital internal EIDE hard drive fail on me this week. It was less then 2 years old. I turned on my PC and heard some metallic clicking noise. I never associated the clicking with a possible failed drive until talking with my next door neighbor.

I've never backed up my hard drives nor did I burn all my digital photos of my 14 month old daugther (maybe 1,000 photos). My biggest fear was losing all those photos. The programs that I had on the drive I really didn't care about, those can be reinstalled.

Unknown to me my neighbor works for a computer company that also does data recovery. He took the drive in and using whatever software they had recovered all my photos. I was lucky, without my neighbor's help, I probably would have lost everything.

Lessons Learned:

Buy another hard drive (they're getting cheap) and use some sort of back up software. It'll save you alot of stress and grief. I just bought Norton Ghost and I've learned XP Pro has a built-in back up feature, but it needs to be turned on to work. Burn copies of your valuable and possibly irreplacable photos.

mike_d

yup, backups are very important. there's a neat program for unix called rsync, i think they also have a windows version too. you can schedule it to run every night (i do mine at 3am). you can backup to another computer (what i do) or just a separate harddrive on the same computer. the nice thing about it, is it only copies over the files that have changed since the last time it was run. that saves a bunch of time and keeps both copies in sync (hence the name rsync).

Corey

iTrader: (1)

Ian, glad you got your pics.
Pics are priceless, and being digital can be very easy to lose unless backed up.

I run an external Seagate 200 GB USB/Firewire hard drive.
I have Bounceback Pro software that I upgraded from the free version of Bounceback that came with it.

Every Sunday at 4 PM the software kicks in and scans my C drive for new files and backs them up to the full backup it did the very first time.
Incremental backup they call it when it scans for any changes since the last backup.

I also use the USB drive to record all of my TV shows from my TV/FM tuner card, and later play them back to my TV in the other room.

Roadrunner

I felt terrible when the drive went down because I was prograstinating for quite awhile and telling my wife I would get around to printing the pics and setting up a back-up drive.

Corey, the external Seagate 200 GB hard drive you mentioned, is that a dedicated drive just for back-up or do you store other data on it? Thanks.

Corey

iTrader: (1)

I also store data on it, and it is fast enough to game off of too.
Works just like a normal hard drive.

You can use it anyway you like.

BruceTS

I run a RAID system with the drives being mirrored, so if one fails it automatically goes to the other. both drives are in removable racks, with a thrid drive as an added layer of backup. I regularly burn data to cd's just in case. I have a stack of failed drives, some were less than a year old.

dibble9012

is it possible to have a RAID setup through a usb setup? As in I have my notebook backed up every night to one hard drive, then have that hard drive mirrored?

mike_d

RAID mirroring is different than just having a separate drive, in RAID both disks are treated as one disk, and the operating system really doesn't know there are two disks there. RAID is great if you care about up time and quick replacement if a drive goes bad. the trouble with RAID is if you accedintaly delete a file, it'll be deleted on both drives, so you lost it. for home use, i think it's more cost effective to have a second drive that you backup to every night. USB is probably the best, but i don't have experience with them.

dibble9012

yea i understand how raid works, just wondering if it would work with usb drives if i had two. I have over 30gb of music on my computer, and would cry if i lost it, not to mention all the family pictures i have. (recently scanned over 300 old slides). Its just wayyy too much to back up on even dual layer dvds, so I would like to have some easier way to back it all up on hard drives.

dibble9012

btw I have a windows machine now, and will be getting a powerbook soon. Still want to keep the ntfs file system though so I can take the hard drive to a pc if I need to.

calrockx

good call on the back-up.

i have a maxtor external hard drive that i use to back up my main computer. i update it once a month or so.
i'd be lost without my music, so i want to be sure to have it backed up. the pictures/documents are important too.

Corey

iTrader: (1)

Dibble, try out a USB drive like I have, you should be happy with it.
My son transfered over a few GB worth of MP3s to it, and I just play them off of it and listen to the music on both my PC and the TV at the same time in the living room.
Music flowing everywhere

I also have my movies I buy backed up to the USB drive, and I can play them back from it again on the PC and the TV at the same time.

The hard drive in my Seagate external is a Baricuda 200 GB 7200 RPM.
It also comes in 300 and now 400 GB.
http://www.seagate.com/products/personal/external.html

Yep, 400 GB, and a 500 GB model coming out in fall.
http://www.seagate.com/products/reta...al/usbfirewire

And if you run it via the Firewire connection, you can daisy chain them and stack 'em and rack 'em.
With USB you run just one.

I may get another one later, then I will set them up via Firewire so I can chain 'em.

lee

ditto... mines an 80GB... i organize it meticulously.

im buying a new laptop soon (my gateway lasted 6 years -- YES SIX YRS!!!), and i can just keep on truckin using my external hd.