Major Hard Drive failure.

[genek]

This week we had a Major hard drive Failure. our ITT guy could not recover our data. He sent me to a group called. Computer Plus in Lexington Ky.
They cloned the hard drive and saved all but one file (over 1,000 files.) They only charged me $179.00 and that included a back up hard drive with 500gb storage. If any of you ever need to try to get info back from a crashed hard drive let me know.. I will put you in touch with them. They said if they could not get it off that they could send it to another place that could take the drive apart and run the drive on a external system and get the info.

[JimDav]

I keep my data on a logical partition devoted to only data and (theoretically) keep it backed up. Programs on another logical partition - both on a second hard drive in the machine. I try to keep my 'C' partition reserved to ONLY operating system stuff as much as possible. Recently had my first hard drive failure in 20 years. Tech guy couldn't help me - first time I ever went to a tech guy. He said 'Good Luck, I can't clone your drive'. The drive would 'fly' but wouldn't boot up even with a rescue disk. Using Acronis, an 'enterprise' level new drive and an external enclosure to house the bad drive connected via USB, was back up and running with NO loss of anything. Admittedly I have an IT background but I swear by using partitioned hard drives. Have done it for years. Theoretically back up partitions on Drive 1 on Drive 2 and vice-versa. But, like the shoemakers kids have holes in their shoes, I don't keep the backups current like I should.

[David Iannone]

Eugene,
Glad to hear you got your data back. But shame on anyone in today's world of file management does not take advantage of the cheap prices of USB external hard drives as backups or pay for cloud storage. Those are 2 easy ways to backup data without having to call on the IT guys.

Dave

[khaos]

Glad you got the save!! Now move forward with a new plan perhaps like mine:Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/)is only $60 a year. Offsite all the time backup with versions. That with True Image (http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/pc-backup/) running as a local backup. Once you set them up they are both transparent and automatic. No forgetting or putting it off! :D:cool:

[Burkhardt]

I guess I am one of the lazy fellows in terms of regular backups. I do that maybe once a quarter as disk image on a removable external hard drive that I keep in a fireproof safe.

But I do save all my current work to a Dropbox (http://dropbox.com) folder. Since these files are rather small and frequently changed, I get by with my free 2 GByte allowance.

I find that Dropbox fabulous and will pay for it when I ever run out of free space:
- it is immediate automatic backup for everything I do
- it keeps a history of deleted files and previous versions. If I screw up and save something I can go back a day or two or a week and recover the last correct version (assuming I remember which version was the correct one).
- It is the easiest file transfer between my home office PC doing the design and CAM and my machine controller in the shop. I just appears without anything I must do on the other end as a regular file as if I had worked on it on the other machine. I find it much more reliable than a home network using windows functions.
- It creates automatically identical files on all my computers: home office, work office, machine controller, traveling laptop not mentioning the Dropbox cloud server and the NSA snooping software. If one of them should burn up I can still find it somewhere.
- I can post a public link to a special file for other people to download something without access to other files

[barrowj]

I use the inexpensive external hard drives, I have 3 - 2tb and one is a Western Digital that has a backup utility that automatically keeps a copy of my data. This way if either one fails, I only have to replace the drive and restore. I also use Dropbox for the shopbot files but for now only as a backup since all of my systems are shared via the internal network.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Joe

[adrianm]

Don't forget about offsite storage though. All the backups in the world won't help if they're all in the same place and you have a fire.

[khaos]

Don't forget about offsite storage though. All the backups in the world won't help if they're all in the same place and you have a fire.

#this is why the Carbonite in addition to the True Image. http://la-isha.com/sites/default/files/green-check-mark-icon.png

[Ernie Balch]

Dropbox works great for automatic storage offsite and automatic transfer to the shop computer.

SpinRite works great for recovering bad drives. It will recover data when nothing else will. It has been around for years and is still the best.
grc.com is where you can buy it.

ernie