Thank God for Backups

[Lester Wareham]

After over 5 years I had the inevitable disk crash on the internal IDE drive that has all my RAWs on, plus as the system went down it also corrupted the external drive with all the secondary masters on.

Fortunately I had backed up the previous day, so I swapped in two 500Gb external drives I had sitting around and restored loosing only an afternoon's pp.

All seems well so yesterday I copied my card onto the RAW drive, but when I use the Windows safe eject on the card reader it also does an unscheduled eject of the RAW drive. Two attempt to recover using chkdsk fail so it is a reformat and restore again.

Fortunately all the PP I had done over the weekend was backed-up although not yet copied to the external backup drives I use. Fortunately, although the target drive for backups is the one that has gone down my backup script copies the backup file onto a folder on the system disk.

It seems this particular problem drive always spontaneously turns off when any other removable drive is undocked, even when the undocked drive is Firewire and the problem drive is USB! Although it's identical sister drive also on USB is fine.

This is a little crazy but to hell with it I have ordered another 500Gb internal IDE to use instead.

Anyway, this little story is to remind you always do you backups. Always store your backups of ideally a pair of cold drives that you only connect when you have to.

[John_B]

Lester Wareham,
Sounds more like thank Lester for preparing for emergency. :)
Glad it worked out ;)

[Lester Wareham]

Cheers John, a case when you can't be paranoid enough!

[GOLDENORFE]

good job you didnt loose much, i had a corupted drive & had to format both h drives

thank god for "memeo auto backup"

phil

[ChasP505]

First of all... Thanks God for backups!

I had a USB external HD failure a few weeks ago, and rather than replace it, I went with an eSATA external HD dock. Much faster. Works like a card reader. I rotate 1TB SATA drives for constant backup.

[tim]

How did it corrupt the external disk? This is a good argument for never keeping external disks plugged in except during backup.

[MaxxuM]

How did it corrupt the external disk? This is a good argument for never keeping external disks plugged in except during backup.

I think it's more of a motivator to buy good equipment, do periodic tests and have more than one failsafe. A good quote while I was in Special Forces was "Two is one and one is none.". I think most USB drives these days are bordering on junk with some notable exceptions. They have become the new throwaway portable drive. I've had external drives on my computer for years, never turning them off, constantly putting them to use and testing them at least once every month or two.

Many people miss one very critical issue with their computers and equipment - bad power. I've been told by IBM engineers that at least 80% of all long term computer failures is somehow connected to bad power. Since putting a power cleaner and APC's in my office and entertainment system I have not had one hardware failure (five+ years). Not one. It's amazing to look over at the power meter on the power cleaner and see the voltage jump up to 180 or dip down the 90. And it's even better to hear the three different alarms as the UPS's sound and the lights in the house dim and still see your computers not even flinching :)

OP, it sounds like you have hardware issues that may not be completely related to your HDDs. One bad drive on a chain can cause all manner of issues. Corruption is not the cause, it's the symptom.

[tim]

In this situation what I assumed had happened was the OS corrupted the 2nd drive when the system went down. I have no idea how that would happen though, and the hardware quality would be irrelevant.

I have no power conditioner, and I don't remember having a hardware problem. I guess it depends on your area. I did try a UPS but it had an annoying high pitched noise that bugged me too much.

[tkbslc]

How did it corrupt the external disk? This is a good argument for never keeping external disks plugged in except during backup.

Seems odd to me, too - maybe the failing drive replicated corrupted data to the good one?

Either way, I previously did Desktop support for a large company (2500 PCs) and with that many, we had a bad hard drive about every other week. Backups are important.

[MaxxuM]

In this situation what I assumed had happened was the OS corrupted the 2nd drive when the system went down. I have no idea how that would happen though, and the hardware quality would be irrelevant.

I have no power conditioner, and I don't remember having a hardware problem. I guess it depends on your area. I did try a UPS but it had an annoying high pitched noise that bugged me too much.

I wouldn't discount anything until I tested it with diag equipment.

[Lester Wareham]

How did it corrupt the external disk? This is a good argument for never keeping external disks plugged in except during backup.

The external drive was used for storing secondary masters, PSDs and was being saved to when one of the internal drives failed locking the PC and requiring a power down.

Once I removed the dead drive so the PC started up I found that although all the data seemed to be on the drive it was now full (should have had about 80Gb spare), a checkdisk didn't help so I rotated it out and restored from backup rather than trust it.

The backup drives are different and only connected when in use, I use a pair of 1Tb external drives kept in separate parts of the house.

I don't normal have much positive to say about microsoft but I have to state that ntbackup is free, easy to use and does what it says on the tin.