Hard drive corrupt? About to lose files?

Ozzig

JustAnotherSaver said:

As said earlier in this, I was in discussion with another guy elsewhere about backups. I'm now not totally against cloud backups. He did touch on the difference between archives & backups. Not quite sure I 'get it' but his pricing on his 'archive' was a smidge over $1 per month. Can't really grumble at that. $12 per year, even if that converts to a bit more in £GBP - I spend more than that on my half of a takeaway order.

That sounds very reasonable, I've got my important stuff synced to a NAS under the stairs and then up to my Google storage (12 months 100GB inc with a Chromebook) and also photos to Amazon photos.

Can I ask who your $ deal is with please ? I need to plan who to use when the Google freebie runs out,

Olinda99

An archive is usually long-term never-changing data that you are unlikely to need to access but want to keep 'just in case'

An example might be your bank statements from 1980 to 2000.

A backup is a copy of your active data - this is likely to change at least in part - maybe every day. The ideal backup situation is one where if your eg hard drive fails you can replace the data with an identical copy up to the point of failure. More likely is that people take daily, weekly or monthly backups.

For critical data you can use journaling - this is a copy made of every change (not the changed data itself but what was done to the data). If you get a failure, you restore the latest backup and then apply the journal.

JustAnotherSaver

Ozzig said:

JustAnotherSaver said:

As said earlier in this, I was in discussion with another guy elsewhere about backups. I'm now not totally against cloud backups. He did touch on the difference between archives & backups. Not quite sure I 'get it' but his pricing on his 'archive' was a smidge over $1 per month. Can't really grumble at that. $12 per year, even if that converts to a bit more in £GBP - I spend more than that on my half of a takeaway order.

That sounds very reasonable, I've got my important stuff synced to a NAS under the stairs and then up to my Google storage (12 months 100GB inc with a Chromebook) and also photos to Amazon photos.

Can I ask who your $ deal is with please ? I need to plan who to use when the Google freebie runs out,

Mine isn't with anyone.

The chap I was speaking to said Glacier. He said:

Glacier is used for ARCHIVE, if you need to pull data from it I wouldn't use it - its meant for like DR or long term storage of stuff you might never need but have to have just in case..

 

Let me look up my last bill ---> $1.13 for the month heheh  I only put critical home movies there.  I think its like 176GB or something currently.

I should prob double check this - I think they have a new deep archive tier that is cheaper, etc. 

 

I have a junk drive I use in my PC, old 3TB disk that is starting to show signs of failing - almost 8 years old..  I just ordered a new 2TB ssd to replace it - just where I store junk, etc.  But its a good excuse for a complete checkup and purge of old stuff no longer need.  Good time to validate I am using the best option for glacier as far as storage..  I think they reworked it awhile back under S3..   So there might be a cheaper option even.  I put stuff there that I would only need in the case of house burned down, and my son lost my BluRays, etc.

 

So yeah, I would take full inventory of what actually requires or deserves offsite storage before determining best course of action.   But if you decide to go that route - it is quite doable and pretty easy to setup if you went with say that synology nas. 

He opened my eyes to the whole backup thing that I wasn't really getting here.

I was thinking I needed to back up everything, EVERYTHING. Then I needed to make a copy of that backup. We're talking many TB here. Somewhere in the region of 10-20TB at the moment with that only going to increase.

It was the '1' that I approached him about - the offsite backing up, because online I could only find answers to backing up say 1TB - which isn't even something I'd ask about. Just stick it on a drive, head down to my mothers & put it in a drawer, done.

But he pointed out do I really need to store EVERYTHING off site? If so then that's fine & can be done.

Alternatively, do I only need to store critical stuff where it'd feel like my world was turned upside down if I lost it - which could/would reduce the off site capacity requirement massively. 

Was just good to have a fresh pair of eyes look at the job. Helped me massively.

Ozzig

I'd not considered the AWS solution - always assumed it would be too expensive after the various free / discounted periods.

The different Glacier tiers do sound appealing, I can use my NAS to look after backups and restore which is nice.

I don't bother backing DVDs I'd ripped or music etc which does reduce my storage needs for the important stuff - pics, home videos, scanned docs etc, but at those prices, I'd reconsider and archive everything   thanks for your reply. 

JustAnotherSaver

Well this isn't going well at all.

So for 20 hours approx. the time ELAPSED was increasing. It's not as responsive as the seconds on a watch for e.g. but after a period of time it'd go up and up and up.

The time LEFT would vary - which is what I'd expect. Put the system under some load & it went up, leave the system alone & it'd come down somewhat.

Around the 20hour mark when Scan Progress said about 54% or 55%, I had finished all my banking tasks (Stellar said it was ok to still use the PC, just not anything intensive) I went downstairs to watch TV.

Let's say 2 hours passed.

So before I go to bed about 11pm, I come back expecting the % to be higher (it was - it said 56%) and expecting the Time ELAPSED to now be 22 hours and I was curious about the Time LEFT hours.

What I came back to was Time ELAPSED saying 15 MINUTES. Time LEFT saying 9 minutes. (Still Phase 3 of 5 as before). This then increased.

I get on to the Live Chat but they really don't seem to understand my question at all. I find it's an Indian originating software with an Indian based Live Chat team and as has mostly been the case whenever I've been put through to Indian call centres, you ask a question in its most basic form & they answer a question that was NOTHING like the one you asked. Like what's your favourite food & answering it with saying the weather tomorrow should be sunny.

So by the time I give up, Time ELAPSED is now saying 40 minutes. I go to bed. 11pm.

Wake up 4am for toilet, check to see how far it's progressed now that the PC has been totally left alone. I was shocked to see it said Time ELAPSED only 50 odd minutes.

I take a screenshot so that I can see later on if it's reading a different cluster or not.

It's now 12:20pm, some 8 hours after I took the screenshot .... and there has been NO change.

And Live Chat seems to be off for the weekend. Not that I'm sure it'd do any good based on our previous chat.

I don't know whether this cluster it's reading is particularly bad & that's why it's taking so long (doubt it) or whether the software has hung or what.

I open task manager & it says Status: Running. It doesn't say anything like not responding, but from the timeframes it seems like it just hasn't budged in like 12 hours.

At this moment in time, I'm considering buying a second hand PC off of Facebook Marketplace, as I can't have this PC tied up like this & just letting the 'new' PC run. Whether that's with Stellar or some other software I don't know.

I don't particularly want a new tower in the house, so another consideration was a laptop - but then the drive would have to be connected via an enclosure & USB and I suspect (I could be wrong) that would slow down the access speeds significantly?

Frustrating isn't the word right now!

Olinda99

you might find a slower I/O speed over usb isn't a problem as I suspect the task is CPU bound rather than I/O bound.

ie a fast laptop would be good

JustAnotherSaver

Olinda99 said:

you might find a slower I/O speed over usb isn't a problem as I suspect the task is CPU bound rather than I/O bound.

ie a fast laptop would be good

In either case, would it be a problem leaving the machine (desktop or laptop) running 24/7?

I don't know what's typical duration for a 6TB drive but let's say it took a week to scan. In fact let's go a little crazy and say 14 days.

Is it a problem for either of those machines to run 24/14?

Obviously the laptop would need to be connected to the mains & not running off battery and in either case the power settings will need to be that while the display can turn off, the machine itself will need to remain 'on' throughout.

And also, obviously I'm not talking about 24/7-365. I know they take a while but that long is a bit much.

debitcardmayhem

Let it run, not a problem, I have a desktop re-purposed as a NAS , the only down side is if you have a power cut/spike then you are back to where you were when stopping the chkdsk

JustAnotherSaver

@debitcardmayhem I did a bit of Googling on the situation last night. An article I read said that the second thing you should do (1st one being stop using the drive) is to clone it. It's only after cloning did they talk about data recovery.

Now I'm wondering whether that applies in my case....

So for me I had a 6TB hard drive which basically shows as 5.5TB in computer. I remember there being somewhere around 500GB-1TB of free space before all this mess (more the 500GB than the 1TB as I don't think any of my drives had TBs of free space).

After chkdsk did its thing, I'm left with accessible files on the drive taking up about 700GB ...... so that's 700GB of files available and 4.3TB of files missing.

My question is, cloning the drive....

1) would it make a knackered drive 'more knackered' in any way?

and then the main question...

2) what would it actually clone (if cloning was successful)? Would it clone the 700GB of files that I can access right now, or would it also clone the 4.3TB of 'lost files'?

So that if I did a data recovery of the original drive & say the PC blew up, would I then be able to recover from the drive I cloned TO or not?

debitcardmayhem

Cloning is always a good option if you have a drive larger or equal, but I would use a “live” linux eg systemrescuecd and use dd to clone it , and use gparted if necessary to create an exact partition on the target. Reading won’t do more damage but may throw errors about unable to read block XXX. Just my way of going forward, or maybe not. Then using the clone run your choice of fiddle on the clone, it’s a bit late in the  day for now since i guess stellar(not in performance perhap) needs to do its bit now.