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Have You Ever Lost a Hard Drive?

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Have You Ever Lost a Hard Drive?

Postby rob » Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:27 am

OK, so here's hoping everyone can learn from my mistakes. ;)

I have 3 hard drives in my computer right now, or at least I used to.

1. for operating system and programs.
2. older drive with mostly my older tracks on it (cubase, samples etc.)
3. newer drive with my newer tracks (up to two years old)

And none for backup.

The other day I realized that some of my tracks in itunes can't be found, mostly anything good. I was busy with work so I thought nothing of it really. Then 2 weekends ago I lost a zip disk for my Triton. No worries though I'd backed up, what must have been more than 200 sequences on and a whole bunch of patch banks on drive #3. I mean I would die if I lost that stuff!

So I went to retreive the back up and, you guessed it, no drive 3. I have tried everything under the sun and my computer will not recognize that hard drive any more. I even booted it in a linux machine and no luck.

It has been with the local data recovery guy for a week now and no luck.

I don't know if I'll be able to get that data back, but the long and the short of it is.
If I do get the data back it will probably cost me around $500 considering how long its taking. :|
If I don't, well, I'll be very very very upset. AND it will probably cost me around $500 considering how long its taking. :(
If I had spent $100 on an external drive that backs up automatically I would be very, very happy right now. :D

So I am getting an external backup drive and installing some easy to use backup software that runs AUTOMATICALLY. I am also crossing my fingers that I will be backing up my old data on it very soon. Then I will be paying myself out of data recovery debt.

So everyone, feel sorry for me please! ;) I have learned my lesson.

Also here's a cool link that walks you through some steps to recovering your drive, even though it didn't work for me.
http://www.wikihow.com/Recover-a-Dead-Hard-Disk
rob
 
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Re: Have You Ever Lost a Hard Drive?

Postby Grauw » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:53 am

Oh, that sucks. I’ve also had my share of hard drive crashes, I’ve now got 2 drives in raid mirror setup to be less vulnerable to hard drive failure (although also having a proper backup may be better).

Windows 7 and Vista’s built-in backup software is pretty good by the way.
Grauw
 
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Re: Have You Ever Lost a Hard Drive?

Postby Rigil » Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:03 am

Yes, I lost an important hardrive last year and now use a portable usb powered drive for backing up everything important. Although, I know that they are prone to go wrong as well.
The annoying thing is that you can lose loads of musical compositions and ideas is the blink of an eye. Things like dozens of cubase/reaper projects just lost forever.
Automatic backup looked good, but I hesitated recently as I still use windows XP as my operating system.
I was thinking of buying a terrabyte external hardive but dithered because of my concern that the bigger the external hardrive, the bigger the risk ?
Rigil
 
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Re: Have You Ever Lost a Hard Drive?

Postby Grauw » Tue Mar 22, 2011 10:18 am

Nah, I wouldn’t say the risk is bigger with big harddrives, and a TB is a pretty standard size nowadays. There’s many factors, like number of platters inside the drive, heat production, firmware errors (like my previous drive that crashed). The important thing is that the likelihood of two drives failing at the same time is pretty low.

Although to cover all contingencies you do have to consider factors like, if they’re plugged into the same electric system a lightning strike will still kill them both. If you un-plug it when not backing up though, you can’t use an automated back-up and it’ll be easy to forget. Also consider fires, for this you really want an off-site backup, e.g. keep your backups in a safe at work. The best and easiest is probably to use an online backup service, there’s plenty of them that do this for a couple of euros a month.

But that’s maybe going a bit too far for the average person :). Just backing up on an USB drive will at least cover the most common of failures (e.g. mechanical failure, or a power supply spike).
Grauw
 
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