HDD died - recovery ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Basically get a linux mint style .iso.,

and instruction manual

burn a dvd, insert in DVD drive and boot.

Then you have linux with no disk involved running on the system - all in RAM

at this point there should be some GUI tools available (Disk Thing) to inspect what drives if any are attached to the system.

The possible outcomes of this are

- No drive appears to be connected at all. You are f***ed. Maybe a new PCB will work

- a drive is connected, (/dev/sd??? exists) but is not mountable. You might try fscking it. but first off you do a sector level copy onto something else.

(dd if=/dev/sdwhatever of=/home/myname/myyfuckeddisk.image)

IN fact a sector level copy is all you need off such a disk. You can then try and either fix that to be mountable, or try and grab data off it anyway.

- a drive is connected, and mountable. At this point you can try reading it file by file. Some will work, some will not.

[The Natural Philosopher]

so that when the cloud crashes all your data is completely lost, and when the cloud gets hacked, all your details are now globally available to any criminal who is prepared top pay for them.

.........BT

FFS you can have a complete VPS for 55 quid a year.

A second drive costs about 55 quid and lasts 5 years.

[rick]

I bought a NAS drive for storage and backup .... the issue is over Ethernet it takes many many Hrs to back up my data. (~12MB/s)

My plan normally is OS backup using AOMEI backupper, with monthly differential backup. For my data (separate HDD) I drag a copy of the folders to my NAS drive (takes a long time) then use 'FileSync' weekly to update any changes.

Not automated .... and if due to other priorities it doesn't get done for a month ... you then have the problem I'm in ...

I know professionally Acronis true image is what most companies use ... but I don't have capacity to store multiple images of the size required. Most of 'my data' is compressed so not much space saving to be had by compression.

~50GB on 'OS drive' and ~250GB on 'my data'

Data usage is forever growing ... my first business PC had the OS and all programmes, and your own storage on a 30MB HDD (MAC SE30) Many applications now run into hundred of MB's Some are over a GB

Incredible that my newly purchased HDD (to replace failure) was 2TB

[leenowell]

For backup I use Crashplan to backup everything automatically to a local HD D and their Cloud. It works very well and the data is encrypted. In case of software failure (ie for some reason the backup can not be decrypted ) I a lso periodically (not as often as I should) copy the most important files t o a hard disk and store it in my office at work.

Before I set all this up, I had a disk failure and ended up getting a repla cement PCB from a Canadian company. They were great. Replacing it was easy (fully instructions and tool provided) and thankfully the disk was fine. If you are interested I can dig out their details.

I agree with those earlier that it is well worth trying to see if it can be seen in Unix first as often this is the case. I use Ubuntu (which also has a live CD option) which is also GUI based and very easy to use. Not that d ifferent from Windows. In fact I ended up rebuilding all my PCs and laptops with Ubuntu and the family (including the kids) use it fine with no instru ction. In my case I could not get any response from window nor Unix either directly connected or via a USB docking station.

[leenowell]

When I changed my PCB the company pit a lot of emphasis on getting one as close as possible to the one I had as there are small differences in seemingly "like" drives. Eg it included firmware version, which factory it was built in and when.

[GB]

All very true, but many people use cloud based email. Gmail, and the like. I guess that you don't?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Nope. I have a cloud, but its MY cloud.

Cost me a £120 a year roughly.

Alone, I am not a sufficiently interesting target, and I dont store any private data on it.

That's all here split across several disk drives.

AND I run my own spam blacklists...I reject about 80 spammails a day. For half a dozen that get through into my spam mailbox, and about one a say that shows up in my inbox.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thats the problem.

My solution is twin disks in the same box, and that IS my NAS storage, Rsync means you only back up whats changed since last night.

Perfect

Well yes, I have that sort of storage,. but that's all videos which I don't back up.

couple of hundred megs of emails and scribblings and source code is all I care about

[NY]

I use external USB drives which have the advantage that when I'm not backing up I can keep them in the firesafe, separate from the PC that they are backing up. Having the discipline to move them between safe and PC each day is a problem... They tend to stay plugged into the PC which guards against disc failure but not against fire or theft.

I use Microsoft Sync Toy for doing incremental backups. I don't know how it compares with Rsync. Does Rsync create an exact file-and-colder copy of the original (as if you'd copied-and-pasted the folder to the backup drive) or does it merge all the files into one amorphous backup file which can only be decoded with the software which created it?

Backup over Ethernet (or, even worse, wifi) can be slow, though not as bad as backup over the internet to cloud storage. How long would it take to do the initial full backup of 2 TB of video recordings, even over FTTC which runs at about 7 Mbps upload? Could be worse, I suppose, such as 0.5 Mbps upload of ADSL :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Put your whole server in a fireproof box..

Exactly. cloud is simply crap really.

It's for people who don't know any better.,

[GB]

I can't tell whether you are just being sensibly careful or completely paranoid? :)

[The Natural Philosopher]

TBH neither can I. the spams aren't a risk, they are simply a nuisance.

Unfortunately I have an email address that's been on the 'net since the early 1990s, and am a prolific correspondent as well as having various online accounts with various things that appear to have been hacked for emails at some point.

And as for marketing. I dont think there is a single time I have been asked for my email address online that hasn't resulted in a deluge of vaguely related spam.

But I have the main spam engines on my blascklist now. It runs to over

300 lines

About 50/50 split between well known and perfecly legal spam generators, and spam bots which are blocked by IP address with spamhaus.

A sprinkling of guesses@mydomains and a few desperate attempts to use me as a relay complete the score.

I used to run a small ISP. I dont trust anyone else to do it better.,

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It's Turnip. Paranoid far too easy a diagnosis.

And no idea how he gets 80 spam emails a day. I take no precautions, and don't even get one a day.

[whisky-dave]

So he couldn;t just drag and drop onto a mac HD then .

I've opened drives up before as for getting them working again I'm not sure. A month agao I opened a PC disk that was taking 20mins to boot. there was a scratch on the surface of the disc measurining about 1cm in lengh.

[Davey]

Rsync is in fact very tunable, but when I back up the day's additions and changes, they are added to the files on the backup drive in exactly the form that they are found on the original drive, and can be read as can any file. There is no tie to rsync for reading them. In a terminal, try man rsync to see what it can do, it is very powerful.

The first paragraph from the man file is: "Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon. It offers a large number of options that control every aspect of its behavior and permit very flexible specification of the set of files to be copied. It is famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination. Rsync is widely used for backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday use."

[Davey]

In this case, it was about 2 feet, at most, so travelling at somewhat less than 16 fps.

The acceleration limit is written inside the case, on the drive itself, and I'm not going to go in there again right now. But I see 350 G quoted in an online discussion about this.

This:

offers 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock, but it is a high-tolerance design.

Whatever it is, when this happened, it did not appear as a force that would have been likely to have caused internal damage, and it was not powered at the time. It is not as though it fell corner-first onto concrete, it fell gently from my hand and landed on my foot, there was no sound (apart from my swearing at having dropped it). If it had been a coffee cup, it would not have shown any damage, it would have just spilled the contents.

[Bob Eager]

It was dragging and dropping that caused the problem in the first place! .-)

[Tim Streater]

Yes, about 11, giving 48G. Actually, TBH, I'm surprised you were unharmed. I had a stage weight land on my foot once, broke some toes. OK - that's a lot heavier but it started at ground level and toppled over. That was enough.

[Bob Eager]

rsync is a file copier. It just copies files. What makes it different is:

- it copies whole hierarchies if required

- it can preserve original creation dates, etc. (great for picking the right copy off backup)

- it does intelligent copying (only copies what it needs to if the destination is already partially populated, and can delete files no longer in the original)

- it can use compresssion and also other fancy stuff to minimise copying

What is in the destination is exactly what is in the source. You could just use a copy utility, and get the same effect - but not so quickly or easily.

[Clive George]

Cloud-based backup every two hours. Costs me 50 quid-odd a year for Crashplan, and it just happily works away in the background. There are other providers.

Anything which involves manual steps is bad for me, so your acronis solution wouldn't work. Though if you were feeling paranoid and actually did it, doing both isn't a bad idea.

I don't worry about the reinstall - have to do one every three years or so anyway.