RE: O/T: Dodged A Bullet

[Lew Hodgett]

My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is about a solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start walking toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic Jack) is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all today starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and all day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7 since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so plan accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to be very lucky.

Lew

[Martin Eastburn]

Likely had recalled parts on the drive motherboard. Happens. Industry is often driven into dangerous deals. Sale price of those was so marginal due to other companies - fractions of a cent adds up.

I lost a powersupply to the computer with a cap that should not have been used in a switcher. Quality of our computers is sliding down. Sad to say. I would not doubt that some manufacturers plan on 5-6 year life cycles to keep business going. Force us into 'cloud' crap and usb disk drives at best.

Martin

[Bill]

It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky. I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at least.

[clare]

That depends how you have the power settings in windows set. You can power the drive down after a set time of not being accessed, as well as shutting off the monitor, and even powering down the processor, or hibernate it.

My last computer ran 24/7 for almost 10 years without any drive failure. That was Windows 98 upgraded to XP. Just upgraded ton a brand new Win7 machine and it runs 24/7 as well (but this one has WS Red hard drives - old one was IBM DTTA 351290 dated Dec 98 , made in Hungary, of all places!!!) My experience has been running 24/7 can often last longer than being shut down and restarted as the bearings don't flatspot and stick on restart. That addresses the mechanical failures - but not the electronic failures - where power surges from start-up can also shorten the life of the drive. My computer is on a Powerware Prestige dual conversion UPS so it gets perfectly clean power all the time.

[Leon]

I save my data on another internal HD and my OS is on a SSHD, Data on HD backed up immediately to the cloud.

[Leon]

I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.

If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and steals your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig. This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.

[John McCoy]

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293 @news6.newsguy.com:

What he said. You can get a terabyte drive for under $100, and most of them come with backup software pre-installed.

In my case, I have two external drives - I keep all my data files on one (the computer drive just has the OS and applications), and I periodically just copy all the data files to the other.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other people to have access to - not backup storage.

Plus in the case of Apple I would not trust them not to make my data inaccessible to me if I haven't upgraded to the newest version of their product/OS.

John

[Brewster]

At my work we deal with multiple petabytes (1000 terabytes) of HD storage. I'm always probing the DM people about which drives they use and the current 'go-to' drive seems to be the WD yellows. This does change every few years as some other drive maker figures out a new trick for longer life.

-BR

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[Doug Miller]

John McCoy wrote in news:XnsA4126445478D1pogosupernews@213.239.209.88:

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO there's an even more important one: security. I certainly wouldn't store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

Or, worse, make it accessible to someone else...

[Larry Blanchard]

You took the words right out of my mouth :-).

I regularly remove drives from my old computers before I junk them. It's surprising how many people sell fairly new computers cheap. They take out the drives to protect their data and assume nobody wants a computer with no drives. I bought my last one for $10 and stuffed two of my old drives in it.

But the industry has reached the point where IDE drives no longer work. SO I'll have to junk my collection and start anew.

[tdacon]

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a household computer). If a household computer is running quite trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives, with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online, going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom

[krw]

Just because someone stores your information somewhere in the "cloud" doesn't mean you should compound the problem by volunteering to store more on another server with unknown/suspect security. Maybe you want to post your SSN & DOB here? ;-)

[adsDUMP]

The drives can shut down, but only if you've gone into the Power configuration and told it to. Depending on what you use the computerfor, the "no activity" timeouts can range from a couple of minutes for the monitor and the hard drive(s) to whatever you need - when I'm downloading new maps for the GPS, I set the drive timeout for several hours because it's s-l-o-w.

I'm currently testing some solid state drives (SSD) for durability. One is in a laptop that's on 24/7 (network monitor), so I'll get an actual "in use" lifetime for it. Another will be the primary drive foir a desktop that's also on most of the time. The biggest improvement is in drive access - booting the laptop takes about half as long as with the original drive.

[Tim Daneliuk]

These two programs - one for Mac, one for PC - will save yer hide when used with an external USB drive. They are free for home use (but you must buy them if using them commercially):

For PC: Macrium Reflect Free Edition

Don't forget to create a recovery boot disk when you first install this product.

For Mac: SuperDuper

This will image your internal Mac drive to an external drive in one of several ways. I prefer to clone the internal drive so that - if it borks - I just plug in the external image and boot from that instead.

For Linux I do something more command-line-ish but it works rather well:

Oh, and people who do not backup their stuff regularly should be charged

10x the normal shop rates for recovery ...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Daneliuk [e-mail] PGP Key:

[Doug Winterburn]

...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make sure backed up something useful.

[clare]

There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data, and those who will.

[krw]

The second group is the universe of computer users. Some (most) have. All, including those who already have, will.

[Leon]

Well actually me backing up to the cloud probably only adds maybe 2% more of the same info that is already out there, probably not that much. And as far as storing on an unknown/suspect security location, it is already 98% in that situation by those that have the information already.

Maybe you want

464-19-7262 09/27/1954 What can you do with that? FWIW it is scrambled just like it is when I upload it. ;~)

[Leon]

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

[Doug Winterburn]

I have several times unintentionally deleted a file. Fortunately, I have always been able to recover it from a backup.

I use backuppc:

Runs automatically every night on a linux server running RAID1 on two

2TB drives.