Hard Lesson Learned

[Mike S]

If you ever get a message from Win7 telling you that you hard drive is about to fail ..... believe it .... it ain't no BS .... Im still down after 3 days but never fear ... I shall be back :lol::lol:

Sent from my A858 Duo

[robert k]

Nice of it to tell you. I have only had one hard drive fail and in that case it was a matter of wondering why it took so long. I have another that has been in continuous use for the last 20 years but it's only 60 GB.

[FlyAway]

Many Hard Drives have a feature called S.M.A.R.T. It does give you a warning things are going wrong. I have a stack of server drives with that warning. We just replace as the servers are mission critical.

 

Sucks when you have to spend hours getting everything reinstalled and configured again. Plus all your data on the crashed drive is FUBAR. I feel your pain, been there done that.

 

Acronis True Image is my best friend when it comes to backup and recovery software. Easy to use and allows you to restore to a larger capacity hard drive. Hard part about it all is keeping up a schedule of backing your pc or laptop to the external USB drive.

 

Depending on the size of the backup drive you can have multiple backup files until you need space and then delete as necessary. Nice thing about the program is you can go back into past backups and pull out files you may have deleted later on.

[Mike S]

Well almost up and running ..... 2 things really saved my arse .... first when I got the first 1-3 messages I ignored them thinking it was M$ doing their crazy stuff tring to scare me into reviving their shut off back-up program .... used to use it except instead it would copy over some of my exisiting files and caused me to loose 5 years of stored pictures when I went from XP Pro to Win 7 ....

 

Anyway after the 4th message I decided to back up my C drive which included my D drive on the same HD .... I saved the files to my 500g passport external USB portable drive ..... and after getting everything transfered over the fun began .... I continued to use my internal HD which was starting to do strange things like getting messages that this or that program was now corrupt (I run several virus and Malware programs so I knew it wasn't that) .... so I decided to try and save the disk by using several disk utility programs .... but all that did was make things worse (the drive is only 3 years old (Seagate 500g) and I didn't want to have to toss it .... pretty soon I couldn't access the C drive which of course was my OS .... so after 3 days off I went to get a new drive ....... Seagate 1tbps ..... it was the only one they had in 1tbps ....

 

Had to fresh load Win 7 (sorry Bob) and then begine to pull all my program files and features of the Passport USB drive (yea .. I know it takes forever) .... now I used Windows back-up and must say it worked surprisingly well (damn spell checker is working AGAIN) BUT some of the folders and files got put into wrong spots so I had to check each and every folder (PITA) .... for some wierd reason windows snap feature didn't work so it was a double PITA .... now to the good part .... all my saved passwords to the hundreds of websites I have signed up to over the years and the bookmarks I had of the websites didn't show up when I reinstalled from the USB drive .... I tried to Google all the info I could to see how to do it but could only find my bookmarks ..... passwords were totally gone .... file showed 6 kbps and wouldn't except any kind of transfer ....

 

As luck was still on my side I remembered after almost a week of boo hooing that I had made a copy of ALL my passwords and printed the copy out (all 4 pages of them) when we had moved from Cebu just in case my desktop was lost or damaged .... and my lovely asawa had put them safely away .... so now even though I can't transfer them in bulk back to FireFox I can atleast know what they are if I need to go to that sight again I can manually install them .... so I am almost done .... for now .... I still have several dozen programs that I have lost passwords to that will need to be retreived ....

 

Well I guess I have been extreamly lucky as from 1978 till now this is the first HD I have lost (well actually in 1978 I didn't have a HD ... only floppies .... :hystery: )

 

So now you know the rest of the story .... lesson learned .... back-up ..... back-up .... back-up .... :thumbsup:

 

Acronis True Image is my best friend when it comes to backup and recovery software.

 

I tried that several years ago but seemed to complicated for my pea brain .... but maybe it is time to retry it again .... I have a spare Samsung 1tbps that I could use .... thanks for the advise I'll check into it .... my computer has a SATA bracket with room for 2 drives on the back (docking stations are OK but way to slow) so I could just plug in the HD when I want to back-up .... I had never installed it  when I built my computer 3 years ago because it looked so ugly with the cables hanging out of the back but after finding it again I relized just how valuable it could be ....

:cheersty:

[Steve & Myrlita]

Hey Mike, maybe a RAID 0 or 1 setup?

[Jollygoodfellow]

As luck was still on my side I remembered after almost a week of boo hooing that I had made a copy of ALL my passwords and printed the copy out (all 4 pages of them) when we had moved from Cebu just in case my desktop was lost or damaged ....

 

When you got it sorted and if you have more than one computer setup sync in Firefox or chrome so that all your bookmarks and passwords are the same on both. 

 

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-a-device-to-firefox-sync

[FlyAway]

Hey Mike, maybe a RAID 0 or 1 setup?

I use RAID 1 Mirror quite a bit. Two of my backup drives are even twin drive in a mirror setup. Call me data paranoid.

 

RAID 0 Stripping write fast but if 1 drive fails, all data is lost.

[Jake]

 

Hey Mike, maybe a RAID 0 or 1 setup?

I use RAID 1 Mirror quite a bit. Two of my backup drives are even twin drive in a mirror setup. Call me data paranoid.

 

RAID 0 Stripping write fast but if 1 drive fails, all data is lost.

 

Hey guys,

 

I was wondering how the solid state devices are coming along?  I know they're coming down in price

but it's still a little out of my league due to budget constraints.  Are they pretty resilient during power

fluctuations?  Have you guys heard of any issues or failures during normal wear and tear?

 

If I could sneak a purchase from my wife Judy, this is what I would probably get, about $176 from

Amazon:

 

 http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Solid-SDSSDHP-256G-G25/dp/B0093HMLAS/ref=sr_1_16?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1378147555&sr=1-16&keywords=ssd

[i am bob]

Hey Mike, maybe a RAID 0 or 1 setup?

I use RAID 1 Mirror quite a bit. Two of my backup drives are even twin drive in a mirror setup. Call me data paranoid.

RAID 0 Stripping write fast but if 1 drive fails, all data is lost.

Hey guys,

I was wondering how the solid state devices are coming along? I know they're coming down in price

but it's still a little out of my league due to budget constraints. Are they pretty resilient during power

fluctuations? Have you guys heard of any issues or failures during normal wear and tear?

If I could sneak a purchase from my wife Judy, this is what I would probably get, about $176 from

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Solid-SDSSDHP-256G-G25/dp/B0093HMLAS/ref=sr_1_16?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1378147555&sr=1-16&keywords=ssd

Sorry, Jake, but like any electronic brain, if the power isn't flat and consistent, failure is very possible. In North America you should not expect any problems (reliable and no failure expectation) but for use in the Philippines? I would really like to have one of those power invertors / filters you like so much!

[i am bob]

Call me Steve Martin (just a wild and crazy guy...) but I rarely backup anything. I use Chromium for my browser and have it synched so I can always access my bookmarks and password. Other than that, if I lose something, odds are I don't use it much and thus is no big deal if I lose it. If only I could have done this with my ex-wife...