[nichpr]

Yep - here's another HD crash story.

My Western Digital HD just 2 years old gave up the ghost this week - with absolutely no warning signs. That's the 3rd Western Digital I've had fail on me and it will be the last.
Just bought 3 Seagates - with a 5 year warranty - one to replace the 2nd HD that crashed, one to replace the C: drive that's still working but is 3 yrs old and a big honkin' 500gb external for backups.

The good news is I had just backed up to DVDs about 10 days before the crash, so while I lost a few recent shots that I will really miss like the Red Maple and Canadian Road Map shots posted in the Critique forum - most everything else is recoverable.

But let that be a lesson to you

It's not if your HD crashes but WHEN Don't get caught

DO IT NOW!

- Paul

[Dave]

Glad to hear you backed up everything so close to the crash

[P-E]

Glad you managed to back up most of your work

[_MB_]

I'm surprised you've had such bad luck with WD. Hope the new drives work OK. Were these externals and if so is your electricity supply stable?

[sejanus]

I've pushed it before and I'll push it again: Linksys NSLU2 (AKA 'the Slug') and a pair of decent USB disks. Attach computer to network; attach NSLU2 to network; set NSLU2 to self-backup and then copy all important files from computer to NSLU2., you now have two copies of those important files. Wait until self-backup runs. Voilla! THREE copies of those files.

Of course, being a pessimist, I also have a clone copy of my hard disk so that I can reboot from that, when the inevitable happens. (All disks crash, it's just a matter of time.)

More info on the Slug here: NSLU2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[VinnyP]

Glad to hear it all worked out OK. I am pretty anal on backups, belt braces and an elasticated waiste. Files back up to an external every night and the system backs up every week. Part of my workflow is to burn a DVD/CD of the raw files before I use them. And similarly I take a DVD backup of the system drive off site if I install anything important as well. I did have one drive out of my raid fail quite recently but was back up and running in a few hours of getting a replacement with nothing lost. The replaced drive has now been replaced under warranty so I have a spare.

The best thing I can recommend is Carbonite. It's automatic online backup with unlimimited storage for, if I remember correctly, about $85 for 2 years. It runs in the background and as soon as you add or modify a file it backs it up. So even if I loose everything the files are safe. Now of course the first backup takes a couple of weeks (420 GB of files) but it's incremental so now I don't even notice it. Of course being on line a full restore would take forever and it only does files, so it's best used along with another method. But even if there was a fire or a burglary and everything went including the backup I'd still have all my files. The other thing worth mentioning is that it stores deleted files for a month.

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by VinnyP

The best thing I can recommend is Carbonite. It's automatic online backup with unlimimited storage for, if I remember correctly, about $85 for 2 years. .

It's $90 for two years - and sounds excellent value! Don't suppose if you know whether it'll do a whole network - I've about 1.5TB spread across 5 systems (it does sound as if it will!)?

[Markulous]

Answering my own question: signed up for the Trial....... and it won't backup the network

I've only about 1TB on this particular system! 20MB so far!

[VinnyP]

Its per machine. So long as they are accessible as network drives I think it will manage but haven't tried it that way.

[Charlotte]

Hmm I'm awful when it comes to backing up ... so awful that I couldn't find how to do it XP doesn't seem to have a back-up utility built in ...

Still trying to set up my new pc + laptop (both Vista) + battling big time with my network set-up (but that's another story), I decided it was high time I backed up my old pc before I did anything else "just in case". So I dug out my WD external drive + plugged it in with the intention of backing up all 3 pc's onto it. After a lot of messing about, it was brought home to me exactly why I had unplugged it + stashed it in the cupboard in the first place ... it slows down my already slow XP system to snail's pace also it will not disconnect - every time I try to "remove it safely" I get a message that it "cannot be safely removed, please try again later" but no matter how many times I try or how long I wait or reboot, it never allows me to "remove it safely"

Anyway, back to the back-up ... using a freebie I downloaded ages ago, I started the back-up at 11.30 this morning. Two hours later it was still going. By 4 o'clock it was clear that the whole system had frozen, so I reset (restarted) the pc. XP did a check disk on the WD drive on boot-up ('cos I didn't "remove it safely") which took ages. I saw that the back-up had in fact completed in 2 hours. Great. Backup995 has an option to archive the backup to a zip folder, which obviously takes up far less space, which I was keen on 'cos I wanted to add other backups, + this one was over 30GB. Another 2 hours later I had a nice small 2GB zip file. It asked if I wanted to delete the large backup file, which of course I did. Not quite another 2 hours but close enough + lots of popups to ask if I really wanted to delete [whatever] read-only file ... + then I think it froze again (can't remember, my brain hurts now) but anyway I ended up deleting the original backup manually, folder by folder.

All in all, a very time consuming + fairly stressful experience which took literally the whole day

Back to the WD external drive, I'm just gonna unplug it ('cos it makes my pc sluggish), buy another one (probably not Western Digital) + backup all over again. The good news is that in the meantime I can now do incremental backups which'll take a fraction of the time (apparently), but the possibly bad news is that I'm not confident that if I needed to restore the backup I did today, that it would work!

Anyway, that's my grumble about backups + my Western Digital external hd over with + I feel better now that I got all that off my chest

Re: online backup services ... nah, I wouldn't place my data online (i.e. on somebody else's pc/server), no way, not ever.

[Dabhand16]

I remember a thread about back-up software some time ago, and there are some free apps around, and obviously some for sale. (I think there might be a free one in our downloads section).

As regards to backups taking forever or freezing the system, I only back up my docs, photos and and e-mails.

If you have lots of photos it will take a long time, so try dividing them up into smaller bits and either backing up in rotation, or setting the software to only backup new files. Once you have caught up with yourself, it should be quite quick.

I can't open multi windows in this browser (at work) so can't search for the thread that did have some useful stuff in it - I'll try to find it at home tomorrow.