Ouch! Hardware Caution - HD Backup

For a real backup I use disk cloning. Drives are pretty cheap and it makes for a fast recovery. The drive my laptop came with is in a box awaiting the day the replacement drive dies so badly the Windows backups no longer work. There was some update MS pushed out that made it so the laptop could not find the drive it was booting from. That reminds me - pick up another point-version backup drive.

I've also found synctoy to be helpful for the data portion of the backup, mostly to keep a working version of a Wiki ready to run.

Every manufacturer of hard-drives has a series of drive that is terrible. Quantum, Seagate, Western Digital, Bernoulli, the jerks with the removeable media click-of-death drives. I'm sure that Samsung, Toshiba, and whoever bought the IBM drive business have all had some disaster. A good drive lasts a long time; a bad one, not so much. There's only so much that accelerated testing can pick up and only so much design can cope with. The bad-cap fiasco that damaged Dell computer's reputation (and showed up in my old Samsung monitor,) for example.

So, do your backups as if someone is going to break into your business or house, steal your computer and set fire to the place, then fill it with 6 feet of water. If you have all that covered, you'll do OK. PS: It's that last part with the fire resistant safe filling with water that really makes the day bad. Read ACM Risks, but don't blame me if you can't sleep afterwards.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. 7 years ago I lost several months of family photos because of a hard drive failure and my laziness to move them over to the normal, backed up location before it happened. I learned my lesson and ended up changing my backup/storage methods to a file server that has a RAID backup. A further offsite backup of the RAID data (spare HDD) protects against most natural disasters and theft except for perhaps a giant asteroid strike or alien invasion.

I use a disk station (multiple disks) from Synology but there are plenty of other manufacturers out there that will work as well or you can build your own. With me, my wife, and kids, there are multiple users and everyone accesses the network storage with permissions that keep them from accessing stuff they shouldn't which is controlled by their windows logins. Nothing but temporary files get saved on the local computers so everybody works off of the network...there's never a problem with speed. It's also our media server for music, videos, pictures, etc. for the TV, and any device connected to the network (phones, etc.). The device is located in a safe place via a long ethernet cable in the house where kids and thieves are unlikely to get to but I still have easy access for offsite backups.

I've since had three hard drives fail on me (one in the NAS and two in different computers) but no data has ever been lost. It was a little pricey for my budget at the time but well worth it in the long run considering what could have been lost in the disk failures over the years. The media server functionality has also been enjoyable. For all hard drives, it's not a matter of if, but when they will fail.

Man, I'm sorry to hear it bro. Best of luck getting it all fixed!