Sometimes its good to be paranoid !

[tommykjensen]

Yes when it comes to harddisks it sometimes is good to be paranoid !

Got home from work, turned on the pc, didn't sound too god turned it off, it sounded like one of the fans were defect. Checked everything, started the pc paying special attention that all fans were working. They did. But the harddisks did not sound too god.

Logged on and my drive with photos was GONE !

Ohh well, its a mirror so I just break the mirror figure out which if the harddisks were dead and just use the other one. After reboots both drives were empty and partitions lost.

BUT, as I am paranoid when it comes to hardisks the loss is so far not too big because I have all the photos on a second computer as well as on DVD's+CD's så I if I can't recover the data with a recovery program the loss will not be huge.. But its a pain in the butt......

So REMEMBER mirror is NEVER the same as backup !

[Belmondo]

Argghhhh!

That sounds painful, Tommy, regardless of how well you've backed up. Still, it's not a complete disaster.

A good lesson for us all.

[RichardtheSane]

In my opinion the best use of a second hard drive is put it in an external holder, hook it by by firewire then do regular backups to that.

Sure, it doesn't give total data security but it beats mirrored drives :)

[thomascanty]

Ouch! I know how that feels. The same thing happened to me a little over a year ago. Fortunately, I'm pretty good about backing my originals up to CD or DVD.

[EoSD30fReAk]

Ouch! I know how that feels. The same thing happened to me a little over a year ago. Fortunately, I'm pretty good about backing my originals up to CD or DVD.
i did that too!
but some of the cd's where sometimes loosing data because of age.
i now use a external HD for backing up. it's much faster than writing to a cd and much safer IMO.
i back up my photo's every time i have new ones, because a HD faillure can always happen.
call me paranoid too but at least my pictures are safe ;)

[thomascanty]

i did that too!
but some of the cd's where sometimes loosing data because of age.

I always make two copies whenever I write out a CD or DVD just in case. I just finished verifying all of the discs three days ago. Not a single error on any of them, and some of the CD's go back about 6 or 7 years. Lucky, I guess. I also had all of the files on my external HD, but I was starting to run low on space, so I pruned that down. I plan to buy another external HD just for triplicate backups and put them all back again soon, though.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I'm the same way...

I do use a Mirrored array.. (hey Hard drives are too cheap these days not to) but I also have an external that gets turned on about once a week for a backup of image files,. and that way I don't feel so bad about not backing up to DVD as religously as I should.

Still.. anytime I come homw with a large collection of new Images.. they go onto DVD asap.

[tommykjensen]

Maybe I should do the same also. But arrrg all the expenses this month, I just bought a new host for my website and bought a compact digital for my vacation in april and now new harddisks and I stil have to save money for the vacation ... sigh....

[iwatkins]

This (http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10504) arrived from my work the other day so I could do backups more easily after i complained that DVD burning every day is a bit of a grind and no-one at my work trusts tape anymore (still have to use DVD weekly though for offsite backups).

Thing is I think they over specified it a bit as all my work stuff can fit on about 35 Gb of disk space, so I'll just have to use it to back up my photos as well (currently using Maxtor One-Touch 250Gbs externals for that). :D

Cheers

Ian (Just call me Mr. Terabyte)

[Scottes]

This is one of a few problems with mirrored disks.

If you ever suspect an issue with a mirrored drive simply remove one - either one - and reboot. If it looks good unplug it and check the other.

Never, ever muck with mirrored drives - muck with one at a time. Check it, re-check it, beat on it and check it again. Once you **know** it's good then check the other.


Don't ask me how I know this... :-)

[tommykjensen]

So far I have found out that both drives have bad sectors approximate in the same area. Talk about bad luck.... I downloaded pc inspector to see if that could recover files but it stops when it hits the bad sectors so it never finds anything.

But Rescue Pro that came with my SanDisk is now scanning the drive and finding lots of files. I did start with this but wanted to try something else first because it looks like it can't recover folders or the original filenames.

But as I started out with its not a big disaster if nothing can be recovered the most important, all my photos are intact.