Reminder to backup your computer often

[Peter M. Eick]

I fired up the server today and doing its normal boot I get a warning from one of my software packages that I have a hard disk caution. After a bit of diagnosis I have determined that 2 of my hard drives are having SMART warnings and I am having two drives with speed warnings and access warnings and retry's. So far no data lost but I do have backups.

So the rest of the day has been spent error checking replacement drives and copying the data over to replacement bare drives. I was surprised that in my stack of old bare drives I have units going back to 2008. I will error check them and see how they do after a detailed testing. They only have about 1900 hours of run time on them as I used them for NAS work and then only had the NAS on when I needed it. The drives that are failing have 25,972 hours on one and 25,970 hours on the other. Not sure where the 2 hours difference came from but obviously I put one in before the other. That is just shy of 3 years of powered up use.

Both are Seagate 1 TB drives. I am replacing one with a WD 1.5TB Black drive and the other I will probably put in a WD 1TB black drive that I have spare. I have some WD Green drives between 1 and 0.5 TB and a blue 0.5 TB drive but I will probably avoid using the "green" drives. WD Green drives are usually 5400 RPM and slow or the 7200 RPM ones are known for parking the heads all the time and wearing out prematurely if you don't change the idle timeout.


So bottom line, just a friendly reminder that if you value your data, back it up and remember a RAID is not a backup.

(no data was lost due to these messages)

 

[bigwheelzip]

Also consider an additional off-site or cloud backup for anything you want to keep.

 

[Peter M. Eick]

Good advice. I keep a rotating quarterly backup set at my ranch which is hundreds of miles away for safe keeping.

 

[Muss Muggins]

I fired up the server today and doing its normal boot I get a warning from one of my software packages that I have a hard disk caution. After a bit of diagnosis I have determined that 2 of my hard drives are having SMART warnings and I am having two drives with speed warnings and access warnings and retry's. So far no data lost but I do have backups.

So the rest of the day has been spent error checking replacement drives and copying the data over to replacement bare drives. I was surprised that in my stack of old bare drives I have units going back to 2008. I will error check them and see how they do after a detailed testing. They only have about 1900 hours of run time on them as I used them for NAS work and then only had the NAS on when I needed it. The drives that are failing have 25,972 hours on one and 25,970 hours on the other. Not sure where the 2 hours difference came from but obviously I put one in before the other. That is just shy of 3 years of powered up use.

Both are Seagate 1 TB drives. I am replacing one with a WD 1.5TB Black drive and the other I will probably put in a WD 1TB black drive that I have spare. I have some WD Green drives between 1 and 0.5 TB and a blue 0.5 TB drive but I will probably avoid using the "green" drives. WD Green drives are usually 5400 RPM and slow or the 7200 RPM ones are known for parking the heads all the time and wearing out prematurely if you don't change the idle timeout.


So bottom line, just a friendly reminder that if you value your data, back it up and remember a RAID is not a backup.

(no data was lost due to these messages)

I don't understand a word you just typed, but the only thing on my computer that I have the chance of losing permanently is pictures and some documents, which fit on a couple SD cards. The pictures always come from an SD card anyway, and I've got actual paper copies of important documents I create, so when my hard drive fails, I buy a new one, reload the Norton, and move on.

 

[BaaBaa]

So bottom line, just a friendly reminder that if you value your data, back it up and remember a RAID is not a backup.

Funny we're replacing our RAID server as well. Moving to 12 terabytes. Mirrored with fail safe for any single drive. Ours has been running 24/7 for 5 years.

Keep both versioned backups of critical files and bootable backups of all machines. At least one set must be offsite somewhere. Cloud backup is a non starter for us given the size of the data to be stored, our slow Internet connection for upload/download and security issues but if it works for you that is certainly an option. Just make plans for how to extract your data back off the system if the cloud provider goes belly up.

Also remember to TEST your backups at least once a month, try to restore a few files from the versioned backups and verify that you can boot from the bootable drive.

It's a good idea to make a plan for data migration from one format to another while you are at it. Not only to take into account the software that has changed and may render your files unreadable but also the storage media. I used to store stuff on CD ROMs. Now the data are far too large to fit on a reasonable number of CDs and few machines have built in CD ROM drives. I'm moving the whole archive onto high capacity hard drives. As part of the move to a new storage media I am also in the process of converting old file formats to more current ones while I still have the software to read the old files. Data migration is something few people consider when developing a backup strategy for their critical files.

And while you're at it, consider making sure all passwords are secure and decide if any sort of encryption is needed for any of your files. For example we store scanned copies of tax returns on an encrypted partition. Passwords are never re-used on any location, machine or web site and are all as big as allowed (usually 50 characters but some places limit to 10 or 32)

 

[e3mrk]

I have three Son's that build Their Own Computers,One is a Electrical engineer and builds Computer Boards.All say that They would not even let a Seagate Hard Drive in the House.
Right now I guess Western Digital is the way to go and They Honor Their Warranty with no questions asked.

 

[oldman10mm]

Docs and pics are backed up to a WD 1TB portable drives and that drive is duped to another WD 1TB portable drive. Not a fan of Seagate and I've had 2 Iomega external drive failures. WD only now. I don't have the auto backup in use,I do it manually. Gives me a chance to look stuff over and delete the really useless stuff first.

 

[ChattanoogaPhil]

I use Apple's Time Machine with an external 2TB WD. Does everything automatically. I also share a 4TB media library with a freind so we both got each covered on that.

If you have to manually or remember to back things up, you've got a system that you'll end up disappointed with.

 

[CoMF]

An external HDD or, at the very least, a USB thumb drive is cheap insurance against disaster.

I don't do compulsive backups as they get to be a little tiresome, but I do back up everything (drivers, installers, bookmarks, etc.) quarterly as a minimum.

 

[cmort666]

I just rebuilt my Linux Wordpress server.

I built it with too small of a /boot partition (based on how-tos on the web). /boot filled up with old kernel installs to the point where you couldn't install the new ones or gracefully uninstall the oldest ones. I managed to delete enough stuff to get it to work, but not well. Wordpress basically ate a weiner without mustard.

I finally got fed up and decided to reinstall, whereupon I discovered that one of the drives in the RAID mirror was disappearing (probably a bad controller board). I had bought an external USB drive to put all my cousin's data from her dead laptop on, then discovered that it would fit on a decent sized flash drive. I took back the USB drive and bought two 2tb drives to replace the 500gbs in the server.

I got the server itself up and running two weekends ago, but have had a hell of a time with Wordpress. Finally got it working yesterday through a combination of purging all of the LAMP and Wordpress stuff and starting over from scratch, and reconfiguring the webhop entry on dyndns.com.

I've had to completely rebuild the Wordpress site from scratch, since I had no backups. I'm thinking of trying to figure out a way to do backups, at least of the website.

Photoblog!

 

[Rustyt1953]

The NSA keeps a back-up of all my stuff.

 

[cmort666]

The NSA keeps a back-up of all my stuff.

And the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) of the Russian Federation keeps backups of the NSA's.