In this case, I think you're being a little harsh. If I found myself extracting a bog standard SATA laptop drive from the external USB enclosure, I'd be doing exactly as Rod suggested, regardless of how the docking station was interfaced to the PC.
Although the balance of probabilities strongly suggests drive damage, you discount the less probable event of a USB bridge adapter issue at your peril. Rod's test is designed to swiftly ascertain whether Graeme's initial findings are due to a USB bridge adapter fault or a drive problem (Graeme's description was a little too vague to allow such a possibility to be completely discounted).
Even if the drive does magically become detectable using another adapter, this doesn't preclude the possibility of bad sectors due to a head crash from it being dropped. It would, however, suggest that there's a fighting chance of being able to run data recovery software with some measure of success.
However, I have to say, if Rod's test failed to allow access to the drive, that wouldn't stop me from attaching it to a test PC via its SATA connections for further testing anyway so it could be argued that such a test would be an unnecessary extra step if you're going to directly connect it up regardless in order to run HDD diagnostics to verify the state of the drive after recieving such shock treatment as described by Graeme.
The charm of Rod's suggestion is that it might be all that's needed to swiftly recover a smaller but critical subset of the back up data from the drive before investing any further time and effort on diagnosis and repair.
I once had a drive that become so corrupted that Windows was unable to dete ct it. Linux could see that it was there. Gnu dd_rescue was able to recov er a lot of data from it although this took about 3 weeks. All the commerc ial recovery packages that I had tried on it crashed and gave up. It regul arly caused the disc controller to hang.
When eventually a mostly recovered disc image was put into a Windows comput er on a new drive, Windows did recognise it and started to repair the files ystem.
So, even if a disc appears to be completely dead to Windows, so long as it is spinning it is worth trying to extract data with gnu dd_rescue. Don't t ry and run dd_rescue from within Windows - this will probably end badly as Windows will try to repair the filesystem if it has to be rebooted during t he recovery.
You're right, of course! :-) but he's _such_ a _regular_ troll, I'm entertaining the possibility that this troll is actually an exercise in an AI "Turing Test" being run by one of the more 'outgoing' AI enthusisasts playing mind games (is the extremely tiny repertoire of 'Put Downs' part of the test?).
You mean a 'proper' grandfather, father, son backup regime? It seems the borked external USB drive in question was an orphan backup device containing some data that had not yet been backed up elsewhere.
The consequences of a single point of failure of such a cheap data backup strategy can often be mitigated if the original data still resides on the primary working storage device. It fails, of course, as soon as you delete the original data and turn the backup into an unbacked up archive as seems might well be the case for Graeme.
3 generations of data backup is good. Add off-site backup and keep everything in formats that should still be readable in 50 years and you're at least relatively safe.
FWIW some data can be backed up further by providing it to other people, a useful strategy for the backupless.
Well, 3 generations of backups might be the ideal for businesses that can afford the luxury of a proper IT department but, imo, would be considerable overkill for most home users, even ones that care about such data integrity. That level of backup would only apply to very small datasets such as documents, spreadsheets, photos and, if not too prolific a home movie enthusiast, their home movies which may well have to make do with just a single backup.
As for the idea of choosing a backup format that would still be readable in half a century's time, I think you're being rather optimistic in this regard, even assuming you hang onto enough old kit as spares in order to resurrect a system that would still support what would, by then, be considered an ancient format.
Back in the early 80s, the best choice, in hindsight, for "A Long Lived Media Format" would have been the humble "1.44MB" floppy disk which has managed to survive a mere quarter of a century but only by virtue of my holding a small stock of drives that can still be attached to all but the most bleeding edge of microATX MoBos.
As it happens, I've got a stack of 8 Floppy disk storage Banx Boxes absolutely crammed full of floppies (some 85 disks per drawer afaicr) with another 80 odd disks squirrelled away elsewhere - a grand total of something like 750 odd floppies, mostly 1.44MB representing almost a full GB's worth of data. It's a sobering thought that an ancient 2GB pen drive could store the lot with room to spare.
Further, I still hold onto socket 7 pentium MoBos for the sake of the
16 bit ISA slots to save me the expense of replacing the ISA SCSI adapter required to interface my 4TB (uncompressed) DAT drive should I ever feel inclined to retrieve old data from any of the 80 odd 2 and 4 GB DAT tapes collection (along with a dozen fresh unused 4GB tape carts) currently stored in a couple of media storage drawers stacked on top of one of the office filing cabinets for the past 15 years or so[1].
With regard to media capable of still being read in 50 years time, I think you're being overly optimistic, even assuming you hang onto the obsolete kit required to read the media. A more realistic target would be for the media to be good for a mere decade or so (which for optical media may be stretching things a bit too far even when choosing the more robust -R over the -RW flavours of CD, DVD and Blu-Ray.
If you are going to put your trust into any of those optical formats, I suggest that you burn two or more identical images per backup disk so that you can utilise to good effect ddrescue's ability to effectively combine two identical bit rotted copies into one good copy of the data volume.
Around the time I figured using tape for backup was a losers' game (a decent tape based backup system to match whatever PC system became entry level with each passing year was going to cost at least three times the price of the whole PC system itself) I also saw the same issue with the much cheaper (compared to 4GB DAT) DVD -R storage media option where the equivilent of a 1TB HDD capacity's worth in DVD media (213 disks) was only marginally cheaper than the HDDs themselves (plus you had the extra time and trouble of slow data transfer rates compounded by the need to use verified writes if you wanted to guarantee that the backups weren't already broken from the start).
It turned out, even 12 or more years ago, that the most cost effective way to backup your hard drive was to... well, use another hard drive! Even back then when the cost in unduplicated optical media storage was still 20 or 30 percent cheaper than another hard disk, the sheer speed and ease of executing a disk to disk backup more than justified the 'extra cost'. These days, HDD storage capacity is well cheaper than optical media making it the "No Brainer" choice of backup storage today.
A simple and cost effective strategy is to invest in a cheap and cheerful e-SATA/USB2/3 SATA disk docking station and a collection of padded boxes or antistatic clamshells often used by the HDD manufacturers to ship their product in.
For those of us that preferred to make our own external USB connected HDDs using our recycled cast offs, it's now pretty well pointless to buy USB enclosures to install your spare/retired HDDs into these days. HDD based backup storage doesn't get much cheaper than a bunch of bare SATA drives and a docking station.
No matter what backup technology you choose, there will always be the issue of reliability. Even if the SATA interface still exists as a viable standard over the next twenty years, will that 20 year old hard drive you've handled with kid gloves and kept out of harms way, largely unused, still be functional after all that time? It may well be but I suspect you will have had the good sense to transfer the data long since to more current storage media by then.
The thing is, although this is good from a point of view of location diversity to guard against local disasters (floods and fire), eventualy, as your personal storage requirements inexorably increase, year on year, these demands are going to become more and more onerus.
Whether there will ever come a day when "Cloud Storage" backups ever become reliable and trustworthy enough and cheap enough to rent from more than a couple of providers to provide enough resilience to properly satisfy your needs is a question that remains to be answered (and that's setting aside the issue of data privacy, encryption notwithstanding), you'll still want to own and have full control of your primary backup storage at the very least.
Unless the "Backupless" have very modest needs, you're unlikely to offer (or expect in return) such free backup storage facitilies without some 'Quid pro quo' arrangement. It's only a useful strategy to the backupless when they have generous friends or are part of a tight knit family with well to do philanthropic members.
The less fortunate 'Backupless' may have to avail themselves of "Free Cloud Storage" (if such 'loss leading' services still exist) for their more modest requirements (documents and a small photo/home movie collection or two) and let the rest of their extensive media collection take its chances.
[1] If I ever get the urge to trawl through this collection in order to transfer any of the old historic data to modern media sometime during the next decade, I could find myself faced with a dead drive or SCSI adapter just by virtue of their simply being stored unused. I suspect calling upon the specialist services of a firm that still maintains the vintage kit required for such data retrieval work won't be a cheap option.
Having considered this, I think it's high time I resurrected a system to process all of these backup tapes and get the data transferred onto current storage media. A quick calculation based on 80 4GB tapes shows a worst case scenario of a 320GB storage requirement. It's bugger all these days now that we are in the era of 4 and 6 TB drives. My NAS box will be able to swallow the whole lot with ease (from where I can archive the data onto a 1TB drive which will provide me with much more rapid and easier access than the old tape backup system could ever hope to provide).
I've no doubt I could do the same for my floppy disk collection (FDD image files and a virtual FDD drive for easy and rapid access).
I disagree. If you care about your data, you back it up properly.
Wrong. SATA docking stations & disks are very cheap.
Agreed. But I still have data that was originally stored on 8" floppy disks. I merely move it onto more modern media as and when I change technologies.
I'm not sure exactly what it is you're disagreeing with. I've already stated the bleedin' obvious that you'd make sure to have at least a couple of backup copies of whatever data you percieve to be precious enough to be worthy of such care (even if the vast majority of what you store is far too large a data set and originated elsewhere to be worthy of the investment in storage simply for the sake of the convenience of avoiding having to re-download it via the internet or await a repeat broadcast).
Again, I can't see why you make such a statement coupled to a condition I'd already mentioned further on in my admittedly lengthy reply ("HDD based backup storage doesn't get much cheaper than a bunch of bare SATA drives and a docking station").
A single docking station is certainly cheap enough but the HDD costs can certainly mount up even at the 2 and 3 TB sweet spot pricepoints if you have more than a trivial amount of data to backup.
Again, you've just stated the bleedin' obvious. Like you, I've also transferred precious data from 8 inch floppies to 5 1/4 inch then onto
3 1/2 inch media almost 2 decades ago now.
The disks in question were the CP/M 2.2 boot media for a Transam Tuscan S100 bus machine. I've still got the original 8 inch disks but I'm not sure whether or not I hung onto the one and only working 8 inch floppy drive. I'm not even sure, after all this time, whether I've still got the S100 FDD controller card(s). Considering what I _have_ hung onto, I'd be very disappointed with myself if these items have been cleared out of my basement workshop.
If you'd read the whole of my reply, you'll already be aware that I'm looking to resurrect a system to set up the DAT drive in so I can transfer the backups from the 2 and 4GB tape cart collection. As it happens, the SCSI adapter card I have stored with the tape drive is actually a PCI adapter so I don't have to assemble a retro system just for the sake of tape drive itself.
However, it has been such a long time since I last used the tape drive in any system, I'm not sure what backup software was used or even whether I had it running under win2k. I think I was still using win95OSR2 at the time I purchased the tape drive and I'm pretty certain I initially started off with an ISA adapter.
The PCI one may simply be a 'later PCI' version adapter that looked like a suitable substitute for the original ISA adapter, one that may not have actually been used with the tape drive before - I just can't recall. It looks like I'll be gathering the sacrificial livestock and studying the incantations once more. :-(
Thank you. However, repairing the drive is on hold at the moment, due to 'other stuff'. Don't ask.
In the meantime, I have taken backups seriously. In the past, I have just bulk copied from one drive to another, but it takes time, being all data, mainly jpegs plus a few pdfs, docts and spreadsheets. About 25GB.
I have downloaded ntbackup, backing up my data drive D to a USB stick, drive E. The backed up file is just over 4GB, so I assume has been compressed. The date of the file is 12/11/14, which is when I created it, but looking at properties, last access was 17/11/14 which is, I hope, when it was backed up again. Backup is scheduled to run at 23.50 each day.
Am I doing this sensibly, and understanding what I am doing?
Data format is often overlooked; little point having the data if no app can read it
its becoming ever easier due to falling costs, bigger hdds, faster interfaces & faster net access.
hdd storage is always cheaper.
not my experience
I suspect the future is an app that enables users to store stuff heavily encrypted on random strangers' machines, quid pro quo. Theres no lack of wasted hdd space out there.
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