And the hard drive dies!!

How did it die? Did it stop spinning, does it make a loud clicking noise (like a metronome), does the computer still "see" the drive? I might be able to help you recover the data if you can provide some info including the type of drive (SATA vs. PATA) etc.
 
I feel a back-up service coming on!

Incidentally, if anyone wants to send me DVD's or pictures you want backing up onto my servers feel free. I have a fair few terabytes not doing anything right now, all of it is RAID 5, all of it is UPS and surge protected.

I never backup to DVD now, they are really very crap.
 
Hmmm, I am just remembering the very true point that ALL hard-drives fail, 100% of them. It is just a matter of when.

The same goes for the drive(s) used for back-up, and unfortunately also for the tapes/tape-drives eventually. A safe solution requires a lot of planning and a lot of time and effort (probably money too).

The dvd option is very vulnerable to heat and light, although there is a wide spread of quality from different brands I suppose.

At work we have just got a new storage system which is waterproof down to 200m . . . . flooding could be a genuine hazard here !
 
I've had DVD's fail, and after a while they just can't hold enough data.

HDD's do fail, they are the only item in a computer that is guaranteed to break! That's why every two years mine get replaced, no matter what. That's also why I never buy cheap drives, never buy drives from the same batch. My home machine has Time Machine running, so every hour any changes are backed up. Once a month that drive gets put on my work server, which means the next day I'll have another 20-odd copies of the work. If my main system drive fails, I install a new one, install Leopard (which takes 15 minutes) then restore from my G-Tech RAID, which takes another 15 minutes.

You can be as safe as you choose, and as much as your wallet allows. We do need a good external storage system though. HDD's are mechanical. DVD's are too small and optical, and scratch way to easily. Tapes fail if you cause a breeze near them.

We need something new.
 
MartinP said:
At work we have just got a new storage system which is waterproof down to 200m . . . . flooding could be a genuine hazard here !
Click to expand...

Thankfully that never stopped a Dutchman before, or else we would be living in Switzerland. :)

As to flooding being a risk... it's not a risk any large company considers real. And they shouldn't. Fire is a much bigger risk, as is power failure, or theft, or human stupidity. It's more important in my line of work (I'm a data storage specialist) to know you have a good copy of the data in two different locations and be able to recover quickly and painlessly at the unhurt location than to dredge up the storage boxes, the tape library, the servers and all and just hope everything still works.... Just my professional experience, of course. :)
 
MartinP said:
Hmmm, I am just remembering the very true point that ALL hard-drives fail, 100% of them. It is just a matter of when.
Click to expand...

The same applies to the universe and everything in it.
 
RdEoSg said:
So I've lost about 300gb of images including all of my scavenged pr0n.

I guess it was bound to happen. Now I have to contact Seagate about getting the data recovered. Lovely.
Click to expand...
Err...as long as your scavenged pr0n doesn't offend the prudence of Seagate!
 
I have two PCs, and use the laptop as a backup to the desktop. If I didn't have the laptop, I'd get one of those external drives for use as backup. I still also have CDs and DVDs as backup media, but I'd rather just hook the two systems together and copy between them if I need a restore.

For the digital photos, I have two media cards, and I don't wipe one until it has been offloaded onto both systems.
 
RdEoSg said:
:bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang:


So I've lost about 300gb of images including all of my scavenged pr0n.

I guess it was bound to happen. Now I have to contact Seagate about getting the data recovered. Lovely


:mad: :mad: :mad:

I have a feeling the money it is going to cost me to get this repaired/recovered is going to be the same price as buying the second external hard drive so I would have had a backup but never did because of cost.....
Click to expand...

There used to be a commercial for a car repair place where the tag line was "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later".

True for computers as well.

As an aside, has anyone tried any of those online backup services?
 
RML said:
As to flooding being a risk... it's not a risk any large company considers real. :)
Click to expand...

Lol, I should have put a smiley after it ! The storage is for the mobile data-store which gets dragged out on location (frequently muddy or dusty) accompanying the tough-notebook thingies. Provided they aren't actually on the notebook at the time, they can be dropped, kicked, squashed etc. without a problem. Very handy.

The site of my last employer was flooded twice though. Then they moved . . .
 
Backup? I have my main internal HD backed up to a second internal HD using Time Machine. All my photos are also on a NAS configured as RAID 1. I also regularly make backups onto another external HD and store that in a different building. And if all that should fail, the worst that would happen is that I'd have to start scanning all my negs and slides again.

I've been in the computer business for nearly 30 years now, and I have seen many many people suffer HD failures (and have suffered several myself - but have never lost any data). And I'm still amazed every time I come across someone who doesn't think their precious data is worth the cost of a backup drive, or who thinks it will never happen to them.

I don't want this to come across as smug or superior or anything, and I really do feel for people who lose their stuff. But please, everyone, learn from this - there are no excuses - back it up!
 
oscroft just made me realise, I don't need to backup, I have the negs! :)

This does make me think about going 100% digital, or to put it another way, it does make me think about never going 100% digital.
 
The thing that puts me off about Mac is the same thing that puts me off about Leica - those who believe in the system are glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, nodding heads to whatever Apple does. Apple is not a God, and neither is Leitz.

I run Linux. Mac people need to be deprogrammed in some camp somewhere.
 
I've run Linux, Unix, OS X and Windows in my time, along with Amiga OS and my own DOS based Os (back when I liked coding).

OSX is the most well-rounded OS I've used. I do like Linux, but I also don't like ugly stuff. ;)
 
Larky said:
oscroft just made me realise, I don't need to backup, I have the negs! :)

This does make me think about going 100% digital, or to put it another way, it does make me think about never going 100% digital.
Click to expand...

And away we go. Sure, let's be smug. A little schadenfreude, maybe? Pleasure in another's pain? You're a nice person. Not.

OK, let's trot it out again. Film are a single point of failure. Lose the original, you've lost it for good. No copy is as good as the original.

Houses burn down. They get swept away in floods, they have earthquakes and mudslides and you name it. Maybe not YOURS, but it happens somewhere, every day.

A copy of a digital photo is the same, bit for bit, as the original. Make copies and put them in more than one place, and you don't have a single point of failure anymore.

One method is better than the other. Always. And you know as well as I do which one that is.

When the World Trade Center was attacked, 40,000 irreplaceable negatives were lost, taken of the Kennedy years. They are gone forever. If they had been scanned and stored in multiple locations - like the financial data that was also destroyed that day - the world would still have them.

So yeah, film rocks, digital sucks. Got it. Moving on.
 
It is not the lack of technical understanding that bothers me. It is the smug, glassy-eyed insistence that no one needs to know...just come with us, Bill, to the land of lollipops and lemonade. Yeah, well, you guys have fun. That kind of behavior skeevs me right out. And yeah, Leica-lovers, BMW acolytes, and so on all tend towards it in one form or another. Love what you love. But no preaching, please, it's icky.
 
The thing that puts me off about Mac is the same thing that puts me off about Leica - those who believe in the system are glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, nodding heads to whatever Apple does.
Click to expand...

Hi Bill,

I have great respect for you (you've been one of my favourite contributors here since I joined), but I'm afraid that is utter, 100%, buffalo poop.

Best regards :D
 
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