well i dun fukked up

"OPPOsaurus WRX" (opposaurus) 07/29/2020 at 07:28 • Filed to: None

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i didn;t have my computer stuff backed up and I lost lots. I had the hard drive shipped out and the fancy clean room lab couldn’ t get it running again. Now I have to restart a project that was 99% complete and forfeit 2 others because I’ll never get to them in a timely manner.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 07:48

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That sucks d ude...I do computer repair on the side from substitute teaching - making backups is the single most important thing you can do! Get yourself an ex ternal hard drive. SSDs are nice, but prob a lot more expensive. I’d just say get a decent mechanical external hard drive.

If you can, I suggest larger size and larger capacity one (I imagine 1TB would do you). By larger size , I don’t mean capacity in GB, I mean physical size...I personally find the larger 3.5" desktop drives are more robust than smaller 2.5" laptop drives - I see 2.5" drives fail more often. Also, if you get an external drive meant to stand up vertically, lay it down on it’s side. Experience tells me this prolongs drives because the servo that runs the read/write arms for reading from the drive platters doesn’t have to also fight gravity when laying on it’s side, so the servo wears out less.

Look into Cobian Backup - it’s free software (and not one of those ‘the less-featured trial version is free’ types, it’s fully free) and works amazingly well. You can set it to make backups as often as you want automatically (most people do daily) and can set it to do timestamped backups (i.e. one for Tuesday, one for Wednesday, one Thursday if you did ‘daily’ ones). OR you could have it set to do ONE backup that it changes when files change, i.e. one huge backup of everything the first time you run it and then it will only back up changes to existing files or copy over new files (or delete ones you deleted) the next time it is scheduled to run - that method is my preference as then the backup mirrors exactly what is on your computer.

Feel free to ask me any questions about it if you do try using it because the interface is a bit convoluted, but it works amazingly well!

pip bip - choose Corrour > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 07:54

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OUCH!

Just Jeepin' > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 07:54

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Ouch, sorry to hear that.

Backups are such a weird beast. In this day of cloud everything, it feels redundant, but of course you have to actually use the cloud...and even if you do, that’s arguably not a true backup because cloud services don’t always retain multiple versions and will often mirror any local deletions, so you can easily get a corrupt “backup” or have no backup at all after an accidental removal.

facw > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 08:05

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Well that sucks. Personally I’ve got Windows backup going to an external, and One Drive syncing my personal folders to the cloud. Would like to see if I can convince Time Machine to back up my work computer to my work One Drive, now that I finally have admin (should be possible, but I think you need to do some weird mounting to convince MacOS that your One Drive is an external disc)

Still doesn’t make me totally happy though, since those are backing up folders rather than a full machine backup. Wish MS would dust off the Windows Home Server backup model and adapt it to use One Drive/Azure storage, that was much nicer backup process.  

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 08:07

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Honestly, I trust the 2.5"ers more. They are at least designed to go into computers that are being moved around in use. 3.5" drives seem sketchier to me. And of course I’ve seen failures with both.

shop-teacher > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 08:07

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Ouch! Sorry to hear that :(

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Just Jeepin' 07/29/2020 at 08:13

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I took an unused HDD, not a particularly large one, and copied over the entirety of my digital images of my family over thirty years and sealed it in double plastic freezer bags with silicon desiccant  packets and mailed it to my brother in Texas to store in his shed.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 08:14

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Smallish stuff lives on Google Drive. Larger collections of things live on a network-attached storage unit with a mirrored pair of hard drives.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > facw 07/29/2020 at 08:15

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I used a network-attached storage device with mirrored hard drives.

facw > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 07/29/2020 at 08:19

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I’ve got one of those too, but I don’t target it for backups. And just as well, since it’s been beeping at me, think the array somehow got out of sync and needs to be repaired (has happened once before).

I figure that baring a fire or some other disaster, it’s unlikely both my machine and the external will go down at the same time, and if they do, I should still have more or less everything of value in the cloud.

Just Jeepin' > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 07/29/2020 at 08:20

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Nice. Regrettably I’ve been far less careful with my photos, but they’re also mostly only sentimental to me.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw 07/29/2020 at 08:21

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Yeah, I get where you’re coming from - I’m just speaking from experience. I’ve seen failures on both, but, at least in personal experience I’d guess 80% of the failures I’ve seen were 2.5" drives and 20% were 3.5" drives, so I trust 3.5" more. I rarely see failures in the desktops I work on in terms of drives....I think another part of it is that desktop drives run cooler as the cases are larger and there is more airflow usually, where laptop drives are sandwiched in there tight with far less room to breathe.

I’ve got an ancient 3.5" 80GB IDE Western Digital drive from 2004 that has 11.5 YEARS of powered on time and that thing has no SMART errors at all and works perfectly! I don’t use it anymore as 80GB is pretty useless these days, but I can’t bear to throw it out because of that fact, haha! Also, it was the first drive I ever bought for my first computer....so stupid nostalgia? :P

Most people don’t carry backup drives with them and just leave them safe at their office for the auto backups to happen when they are there, so where it wouldn’t be moving around with him in that case (I’m assuming, of course), 3.5" would be fine, I’d think?

If you’re going 2.5", at least go for Seagate or Western Digital - Of the 2.5" drives I’ve seen fail, those are the brands I’ve seen fail far less often. Most of the failures I’ve seen seem to be Toshiba (by far) or Hitachi.

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 08:30

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I mean it’s hard to not go with Seagate and Western Digital. Toshiba is out there, but I really don’t see it much. Hitachi’s hard drive business was bought by WD in 2012, and seems to be phased out at this point.

It’s a pity since I’ve had really bad reliability luck with Seagate Drives, and Western Digital’s recent attempt to push SMR drives as NAS drives despite being unsuitable has rubbed me the wrong way with them. Maybe SSD’s will keep getting cheaper and we can finally ignore the spinning discs even for backup.  

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw 07/29/2020 at 09:01

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Yeah, I’ve heard Seagate hasn’t been as good lately. Western Digital has been by far my personal go-to for years (except their ‘Green’ drives....those suck). I guess what I meant is if he was going to get a new external just to get one from Seagate or WD rather than like...some cheap external on Amazon where you don’t know what brand of drive is in there.

I’ve never really dealt with NAS-specific or server drives, just their consumer grade ‘blacks’ and ‘blues’ and the like and have never had any issues at all (I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen any WD drives fail, personally, other than ONE where the laptop got dunked with coffee, so that failure wasn’t the drive’s fault!).

My HP TouchSmart 14 laptop has a WD 500GB in it atm and my desktop has a 250GB Samsung 860 Evo SSD drive for the OS and a 1TB Western Digital Blue for a Data drive. My old Core 2 Duo ‘Media Center’ PC has a 500GB Seagate drive of some sort. My desktop and the Media Center PC stay on 24/7 and their drives have been good for me so far!

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 09:13

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The only spinners I have these days are two 4TB drives in my NAS and two externals (well actually I have a huge stack of old 3.5" drives that I want to go through and make sure I’m not missing any photos or anything else important before tossing). As for the machines I actually use (which are all SSD) :

Desktop: 1TB Samsung , 750GB Samsung (I’ve got a 1TB Sandisk of some sort that’s probably going in here soon, need to clean it off)

Laptop: 512GB Mushkin (recently upgraded so I’d have room to dual boot Ubuntu)

HTPC: 500GB Crucial (there’s an unused a 256 GB Samsung in there that I haven’t bothered taking out as well )

Work l aptop: 1TB something

Other work laptop: 256GB Samsung (replaced a spinning disk, no idea what they were doing buying non-SSDs in 2016, but I did eventually get them to upgrade me when we switched to Windows 10)

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 09:23

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Damn... I’ve been there. Sorry to hear it. Live and learn.

TheRealBicycleBuck > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 09:27

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We delivered our electronic project deliverables on an 8TB WD external drive to one of our customers. The drive itself was 3.5". It was sitting on a desk and someone snagged the power cord . The running drive fell to its death. Either the drive didn’t have motion sensors to park the heads before the impact or something was bent when the cord was snagged.

When they returned it to us in hopes we could save the data, I could hear at least one drive head scraping on a platter when it powered up. We ran the numbers and it was cheaper to buy a replacement drive and restore the files from our server than it was to send the drive out to a recovery service.

TheRealBicycleBuck > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 09:29

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Sorry to hear that. I lost a bunch of project data when my laptop was stolen last year. I’m still mad about it .

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > TheRealBicycleBuck 07/29/2020 at 10:04

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Yeah, I don’t think most mechanical external drives have motion sensors that I know of. I’ve, of course, heard of laptops having them, but never drives themselves other than maybe super high end ones...?

Sucks when you can’t recover data from them, but at least you could get the data back from the server!

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw 07/29/2020 at 10:06

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Nice. The Samsung EVO series and Crucial MX500 series are usually my go-to purchases for SSDs. I m ostly go with them as they seem to be the brands/models people recommend the most!

Depending on the size of those mechanical drives you have laying around...not sure about where you live, but where I live I can still sell those (if they are 500GB or larger) for like $30 each...though I use the ‘shred’ command in Linux to securely wipe them first.

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 10:12

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I believe my stack of hard drives ranges from 210MB to 2TB. There are probably half a dozen 1.5TB drives in there.

I’m think too much hassle to try to sell them though, most of them are at least 8 years old, so I’m happy enough to just check them, wipe them, and toss them.

Tripper > OPPOsaurus WRX 07/29/2020 at 10:18

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Damn man that sucks big time. I have my stuff backed up all over the place and still manage to things like this occasionally. I have also sent out a HD to a clean room place to no avail:(

Was it an SSD or a spinner?

TheRealBicycleBuck > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 10:19

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PC MAG claims that “ Modern drives have acceleration sensors, which detect a fall and rapidly “park” the heads in a safe place before impact, but even that’s not foolproof.”

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-rugged-hard-drives-and-ssds

This is a review on ruggedized drives, so it’s not clear if they’re making the claim for ruggedized drives or all “modern” drives.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > TheRealBicycleBuck 07/29/2020 at 10:33

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Pretty sure that’s only for ‘ruggedized’ drives. I’ve never heard of EVERY drive having that function....except sortof SSDs in the sense hey are solid state so it doesn’t matter for them anyway, lol.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw 07/29/2020 at 10:33

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Send the to me and I’ll sell em for you! I can get like $60-70 for a 1TB drive here, lol!

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 10:39

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Heh, am I even allowed to send stuff to Canada these days?

I was actually looking at some chairs on Boston Craigslist yesterday, and then was super annoyed to see they were listed as being in New Brunswick, and it’s like yeah I couldn’t go there to buy those even if I wanted to...

TheRealBicycleBuck > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 07/29/2020 at 10:49

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I hate these poorly documented features which lead me down the internet’s rabbit holes. I found interesting references on SMART drive monitoring and a general statement about which companies use the Free Fall Detection events parameter.

“ Attribute ID: 254 (0xFE)

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Samsung, Seagate, IBM (Hitachi), Fujitsu (not all models), Maxtor, Western Digital (not all models) ”

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw 07/29/2020 at 14:28

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Oh man, I hate when people post in another area’s Craiglist/Kijiji section.....’cause you get your hopes up and then BAM, DENIED. :/

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > TheRealBicycleBuck 07/29/2020 at 18:42

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Yeah, every drive has had SMART in some form since the early 2000s or so. CrystalDiskInfo is a good free program to view the SMART diagnostic health of your drives :)

Yeah, I figured only some models of drives had that feature built in. Neat that it’s related to SMART though!