Why you back up...

Hammyman

A friend of mine has lost nearly 40GB of data accumulated over several years. His "backup" drive was a 40GB hard drive that's died - no other backups. When I removed the drive from the computer, it was manufactured in Nov 2001. It has merely come to the end of its natural life.

Anyway, lots of very important documents on there, years of photos etc.

Due to its age, recovery isn't going to be simple as the cheapest way of removing the platters and sticking them in another drive chassis requires such a chassis to be available. In fact the hard drive is so old that when I phoned up the data recovery company I use, I was asked if it was out of a CNC milling machine and was gobsmacked it was from a desktop.

My friend has been quoted £350-£550 + VAT for recovery which he's going to have to pay due to some of the content being needed. Yes I know there are cheaper companies but all they do is shove the drive in a computer and try to read it, usually failing to do anything and usually making it worse when its a physical error.

And all for the sake of shoving a 50p disc in a drive and burning information and spending £50 on a replacement HDD every couple of years.

KillerWatt

Hammyman wrote: »

And all for the sake of shoving a 50p disc in a drive and burning information and spending £50 on a replacement HDD every couple of years.

A hard drive can fail the minute you plug it in, and optical media doesn't offer anything more in terms of redundancy.

If you want true redundancy then it's got to be RAID 5 as an absolute minimum to start with (preferably hot swappable so there is no downtime while the disk is swapped), and you really need to be mirroring that if you are that paranoid because it is possible for 2 disk drives to fail simultaneously.

As far as £550 for the data recovery goes, that is cheap.

Trinitrotoluene

RAID is not a backup and should never be relied upon as a backup. It offers redundancy, yes, but it is not a backup!

KillerWatt

Trinitrotoluene wrote: »

RAID is not a backup and should never be relied upon as a backup. It offers redundancy, yes, but it is not a backup!

I don't recall anyone saying that any form of RAID was a backup solution, RAID is simply a technology that allows for increased reliability of storage (depending on RAID level used obviously).

Enterprise_1701C

I have back-ups of the back-ups of my photos, they are so precious to me! Anything vital is immediately backed up onto a hard drive, and for business invoices we always take - wait for it - a paper copy!! Easiest to refer to I am afraid. I have never needed these bak-ups yet, but if I do I shall be fine!

sickofusernames

I've gone for slight overkill on the backup front:-

Laptop is primary device for all my personal pics/music/personal stuff
Media Server PC is the 1st backup, done regular.
My spare PC is the 2nd backup, done monthly(ish)
and my Ipod Touch has all my music/pics
.......Plus I have a recent incremental DVD backup of Pics

KillerWatt

sickofusernames wrote: »

and my Ipod Touch has all my music/pics

Let me know when Apple release a 2TB iPod, although that would only (just about) cover my music collection :rotfl:

sickofusernames

KillerWatt wrote: »

Let me know when Apple release a 2TB iPod, although that would only (just about) cover my music collection :rotfl:

Must admit, i've not got a lot of music - only about 10GB worth but that's more than enough for me, you must listen to a lot of <rhymes with kite>

totalsolutions

OP You said the backup failed no other backup where is the original then ?

Anyway have you heard of Spinrite ? Steve Gibsons hard drive recovery and maintenance software ? Give it a try.

Dreamnine

I have 1.3TB that is just audio files.

googler

sickofusernames wrote: »

Must admit, i've not got a lot of music - only about 10GB worth but that's more than enough for me, you must listen to a lot of <rhymes with kite>

Don't mock.

The rest of us wouldn't want to listen to the same stuff over and over again as you seem to be doing......