My computer has died - RIP

scrumhalf

Well, recuva has been copying files from dead HDD to new HDD for about 55 hours now. The program's estimates of time left vary from 12-14 hours (as they have done for the past 48 hours) but is is recovering the data. Not all of it, but for a free program that's not bad.

Given how nothing else could even access the drive it's pretty damn incredible.

Voxman

scrumhalf said:

Well, recuva has been copying files from dead HDD to new HDD for about 55 hours now. The program's estimates of time left vary from 12-14 hours (as they have done for the past 48 hours) but is is recovering the data. Not all of it, but for a free program that's not bad.

Given how nothing else could even access the drive it's pretty damn incredible.

I think the disk has to meet certain minimum criterion in order for Recuva to work and sadly my disk is so badly damaged that Recuva can't work on it.  Fortunately all my data is backed up, and I do have access to all my e-mails so nothing lost.  

scrumhalf

Trying EasUS now, but no luck. I suspect I was lucky in getting as much as I did before the disk died.

Makes you wonder how to back things up in this multi-terabyte age.

Voxman

scrumhalf said:

Trying EasUS now, but no luck. I suspect I was lucky in getting as much as I did before the disk died.

Makes you wonder how to back things up in this multi-terabyte age.

I think multi-back ups are the way to go.  Backed up on external hard drive but also 2nd hard drive back-up in different location or on cloud - God forbid you have a robbery, fire or water damage, your backup drive could be lost too - so a 'cloud' solution well worth doing for peace of mind too, which can be accessed from anywhere on any computer. 

Axe_meister

No backup strategy is any good without a restore strategy 

Voxman

Axe_meister said:

No backup strategy is any good without a restore strategy 

Not sure what you mean?

Danny1969

I do a lot of data recovery jobs and a lot of them are external USB 1Tb drives or larger. People buy them, backup everything to them ... often moving data to them rather than copying and when the drive fails they are at a risk of losing everything. The bigger the drive the more compacted the data density is and the less room there is for error. Although modern manufacturing has improved the processes over the years I often  see failures caused  by the coating on the platters failing, internal pre amp failures and actual mechanical failure of the arm. Many years ago when I got into it you could actually remove the lid of something like a 2Gb drive and manually start it, I have a video somewhere showing me getting data off a 1.2Gb IBM 2.5" drive with the lid off. Course once the airs hit the platter the drives fucked but once the data was off it didn't. matter.  On a modern drive it's only the internal pressure built up by the platter spinning that keeps the head floating a micro amount above the platter. It won't even work with the lid off. 

Also you can't swap PCB's anymore even from the same type of drive with the same firmware. There's a map of the drive in the rom that the PCB is paired with and it won't play nice with any other stack of platters, each platter map is unique.  

I personally use cloud backup for important but small amount of data stuff. My circuit designs, FTP and  finance stuff. For photo's,  music, videos and such I use multiple small redundant drives off around 120Gb or so with anything important copied to at least 2 drives. I haven't got any large drives 

Axe_meister

Voxman said:

Axe_meister said:

No backup strategy is any good without a restore strategy 

Not sure what you mean?

You need to know you can restore. That means a restore test.
Even large corporations forget about this. I had one customer who was convinced their back-up strategy was the best. One night they had  a masssive failure and had to go to tape to restore. Only to find it was empty, as was the tape before going back the full 30 days of their tape cycle.
On closer expection a cruicial backup config file had the command backup > /dev/null (null device)
Much red faces. Fortunatly we'd done a manual backup to disk using a different utility a couple of days before to do a system copy.
The Moral is. Test you can restore your backups

Voxman

Axe_meister said:

Voxman said:

Axe_meister said:

No backup strategy is any good without a restore strategy 

Not sure what you mean?

You need to know you can restore. That means a restore test.
Even large corporations forget about this. I had one customer who was convinced their back-up strategy was the best. One night they had  a masssive failure and had to go to tape to restore. Only to find it was empty, as was the tape before going back the full 30 days of their tape cycle.
On closer expection a cruicial backup config file had the command backup > /dev/null (null device)
Much red faces. Fortunatly we'd done a manual backup to disk using a different utility a couple of days before to do a system copy.
The Moral is. Test you can restore your backups

I understand, & with Acronis 2017 you can do that (not sure about windows image backup though).  As I explained, I couldn't create an image backup because of an I/O error.  My data is backed up to a Seagate Hard drive (mains powered) and a Toshiba USB hard drive. important docs are on cloud too. 

ICBM

I also use the multiple-offboard-drive method. I have two complete backups which are exchanged weekly and the non-current one is kept at my work 50 miles away. On top of that I have several smaller drives which contain the really vital stuff - documents, music and family photos mostly - which are distributed around the house and one kept in a lock-up garage round the corner (that one doesn't contain anything with personal details, just the photos and some music). So I think I'm reasonably safe, although I have considered cloud backup too, more for convenience of accessing files from elsewhere than anything. I'm probably a bit OCD about it but you can't really have too many backups.

What's good about digital information is that with simple steps it's very easy to make the information very robust - far more than a traditional paper document or photo, which could easily be destroyed in a fire - but so many people don't, and then it's *less* robust. Someone I know had their house broken into, and the computer was taken… and so was the only backup hard drive which was next to it. All the photos gone .

ThePrettyDamned

I use two 4tb drives as backup, both include a system image - I used acronis and it clones your disks. So I should be able to restore the entire system, including windows, from them. I should probably test it, but don't fancy wiping my computer to see if it'll work! 

olafgarten

I've got a NAS with 2 mirrored hard drives, every month I swap one of the drives and rebuild the raid, I store the third drive off site.