Man in a Shed: Are you ready for .....

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Are you ready for .....

Hard Disk failure ?

I just ask as my Mum was on the phone complaining her PC wouldn't boot and was making a nasty clicking noise. Sounded like her HDD had shuffled of its mortal coil.

Just a thought for today.. Do you have your critical information backed up ( and just as importantly do I ? ).

Could happen to anyone .... ( Though its the first time its happened to someone I know ).

PS I've told her about the possibility of getting data recovery from the disk - as a price.

4 comments:

Wyrdtimes said...: I've had a few data scrapes in my time but these days I back up regularly to an external HDD.

If you're running a PC I strongly recommend Microsoft SyncToy a free backup utility - makes backing up your files very easy.; 7:36 pm
Man in a Shed said...: I'm a user of Jungle Disk aimed at Amazon S3 storage ( they were bought out by Rackspace and have started pushing people to their 'cloud' storage offering. Rackspace I don't really know - Amazon I have faith in ).

Not much of this helps Mum who convinced computers are some sort of conspiracy anyway ...; 11:20 pm
Unknown said...: And then there's the pain of backuping up your backups of old systems. Jaz drives, Zip drives, floppy disks galore - and not as straightforward to access any more.

Online is convenient. I would say that the safest idea though is to get a big external drive, but keep it at parents/siblings/friend - just generally elsewhere when not actively taking a backup.; 9:31 am
Man in a Shed said...: I used to run tape drives - which saved my skin a number of times when writing up my research project and developing a 3-D graphics app in Windows 3.11 ( hint - involves rebooting every half hour ).

The problem with physical devises is you can suffer common mode failure.

The downside of the online offerings that integrate into your directory structure is that some computer viruses that encrypt certain files could destroy your back up also.

I go for the belt and braces approach, developing on a virtual machine ( copies exist ) and with critical data regularly backed up online, and occasionally to physical media.

You just can't be too paranoid when it comes to backup.

The other thing about backups is you have no idea if they work until you've tried them. Iw orked for a company that was creating blank tapes when it thought it was doing backups until one day it needed them ....; 9:57 am

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The pound in your pocket

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