Warning - this contains depressing information

[Merlin66]

We faithfully follow the guidelines and back up our computers every month.....
The back up hard drive which was holding information going back to 2010 has died!!!!!
With no signs of life and now not powering up and not recognised by any of the computers.......
All that data lost and gone forever.....
How many back-ups of back-ups do you have to make to have a reliable data back-up??
My wife is very upset (with me!) - we think some important family photos have been lost (never mind my old spectroscopic data)
Bumma!

[trent_julie]

This is how I would describe it

loop
existing backups (n) + 1
do loop

In all seriousness there are data recovery options and services $$

Trent

[leon]

Yes I think it may be able to be retrieved, I am not sure who would do this, but i have heard of other people recovering stuff from dead Hard Dives.
I am sure some more experienced member will come to the rescue.

Leon

[FlashDrive]

I have my Main Backup ( on a Partition being ' D ' drive ) .... then I have ' it ' backed up on another ' Wireless ' stand alone ' external WD Personal Cloud Drive connected to my Modem / Router.....Double Redundancy I suppose.

Col.

[TheCrazedLog]

It depends on what the drive is.

If the drive is an external USB drive then it is quite possible that just the USB side of things has died. The actual hard drive that is in the guts of it is separate and may be quite fine.

If this is the sort of drive you have, head down to jaycar or equivalent and get a USB to SATA connector. Pull apart your USB drive (gently) and plug it in and see what happens. To me this sounds like the situation you're in and there's definitely hope.

That's one option. The other option is specialist data recovery. Expect to pay many hundreds.

That's the first part. The second is this:

I've worked in IT for 12 years now and the overriding factor with backups is avoiding "Single point of failure".

A single point of failure is the the point where one thing can die and the whole system fails. An example is the engine in car: if that breaks, nothing works. Another example is the light bulb in a single bulb light: if it breaks, nothing works.

The point of backups is avoiding that single point of failure. The first thing you do is you *copy* the data to an external drive. You now have data in two places. A common mistake (and what it unfortunately seems like you've done here) is to move the data from one hard drive to the other. That achieves very little, as you've regrettably discovered. Most people learn this lesson the hard way to varying degrees, myself included.

Let's go back to our example. You've now got a USB drive plugged into your computer and both it and your main hard drive have the data. Safe? No. What if a power surge comes down and fries your hard drive and the connected USB drive? It can happen. Ok, so you unplug it. Safe now right?

Well, that depends. What if you have a house fire? All the data is stored in one place still and a single fire will take it all out. Now you can argue I'm going a bit far here and maybe I am, but how far you take this exercise depends on how much you care about your data. If it is music, fine, two locations in your house is fine. If it is your thesis which you've worked on for 9 years, then probably not. I know of a new story sometime back where that exact situation happened and he lost his thesis.

At home, I've got hourly writes to an external hard drive which is rotated with an offsite location once a week. I lose a week's worth of data. I still do have a single point of failure though: if someone nukes East Maitland then they'll take out both copies, but, I think at that point I won't care much about my files :P

I was taught something in my flight training which I think is very relevant: "Don't be surprised if the engine stops, just disappointed". Same thing with IT unfortunately.

[Merlin66]

Hmm
It was a Maxtor 4 touch external hard drive - a Seagate Barracuda 7200, 500Gb hard drive.
I've removed the HD from the enclosure and using a USB Hi-speed SATA connector have tried it in all our PC's.
Nada.....
I've ordered a replacement 1Tb drive and when it arrives we will "review" our back-up techniques.....
Very sad:(

[PCH]

A NAS configured as a RAID array gives some redundancy Ken. In my situation, all my gear is in one place so if the house burns down I'm stuffed.

But failing that, my PCs are backed up to the NAS which then effectively stores two mirror images of the same thing aboard it. When either/any of the NAS drives fail (which has happened) you just replace the drive with a new one and the thing rebuilds itself.

The NAS cost about $500 but I do feel some sense of security with it. Naturally, we don't delete stuff off the PCs either so there's always effectively three copies of our information floating about.

I'm giving thought to mirroring my valued information to one of the cloud based repositories but haven't fully decided yet.

I also think it's important to decide on your recovery plan whilst your PC is working ok. Figure out your plan of attack for when you go to it one morning, turn it on and it's dead. What would you do?

Get your ideas together, actually create your ISO images, and do up some idiot instructions detailing how to put it back together.

Just my 2c - hope it helps :)

[torana68]

You can recover it only thing that you cat recover from fully is a pike through the hard disc. Mine is on 2 separate computers one external and I back up to DVD's now and then. Was easier when all I had was photo negatives and an a-z file......

[gary]

Hi Ken,

The Seagate Barracuda that failed, if you put your ear to it can you hear
it spin up? Or does it make any other noise, like a "tick, tick, tick..."?

[julianh72]

Ken,

Hopefully, a data recovery service will be able to recover the data from the drive for you.

It's a bit late for your current problem (at least, until you can recover your data), but have you considered using an online backup solution?

I use my free Google Drive storage to save everything that is important to me - I have unlimited storage space for photos (which are accessible through Google Photos), virtually unlimited storage space for music (because I have a Google Play Music subscription), and the remaining free storage (15 GB by default; but you often get more if you link a new Android device or similar) is ample for backing up my other critical files. All I have to do is link the relevant folders on my devices with my Google Drive account, and the back-up is done for me - and of course, all files are accessible from any internet-connected device. (Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, etc can also be used as free alternatives with similar functionality.)

I still do back-ups myself, but I figure Google's servers are probably more reliable than the cheap drive that I bought at Harvey Norman.

This may not be a viable free / cheap option if you are not happy with the idea of "sharing" your personal data with Google (or Microsoft or whoever) - but I don't really worry about someone at Google looking at my holiday pictures! Also, the free storage quota may not be sufficient if you have hundreds of GB of data that needs to be backed up, but since Google doesn't count my photos or music, it works for me.

[Merlin66]

Gary,
No tick, no tock, no sound, nothing.....
Yeah, I'm thinking of the Cloud as an off site back-up.....

[gary]

Hi Ken,

Sometimes the head can get stuck on the platter and you will often hear the drive tick as the actuator tries to move it.

Since you described the drive as including "some important family photos"
a professional data recovery service would be the recommended
approach, which, as you can imagine, can be expensive.

For less important data or a situation such as recovering data created
in the hours before a backup took place, for the brave you can find a clean
workplace and open the drive up and have a look. The lid on most drives
are fastened by screws. Sometimes one or more screws can be hidden
under the manufacturer's sticky label which you would then peel off.

Normally you would only want to perform this type of operation in a class-1
cleanroom but many have successfully recovered drives opened on the
kitchen table.

If one searches on YouTube you can find many DIY demos of how to
open a drive and various approaches from best-practice to ham-fisted
in retracting the head.

See https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ticking+hard+d rive+recovery

If the head isn't stuck, one can try rocking the main spindle a little
with the hope the motor will then start up when power is re-applied.

The polished mirror finish of many drives is a marvel to look at and admire
in any case. Dust settling on the surface can result in a head-crash
but one hopes centrifugal force will clear some of it that gathers in the
brief time it was opened.

If after re-assembling a drive it does power on, don't power it off again
until all the data is transferred to another disk. In other words, make
sure the new disk is connected and ready to go.

If there has been a head-crash, some data loss is probable and retracting
a head without the right jig can cause it to drag across the surface and
result in more loss.

But it is a handy trick to know if you have no other option or the
professional data recovery costs don't warrant it.

I gather you weren't really backing up at all so much as using the drive
as an archive?

[el_draco]

I learned the off-site backup at just the right time. Now, I back up hard drive to external drive and second external drive which remains off-site but secure. I ONCE got to the off-site drive as my final hope and it saved my arsenal... VERY GOOD IDEA! :thumbsup:

[The_bluester]

At the moment we have all our important data backed up onto a NAS in a RAID5 array. From there it is further backed up weekly to a single drive that we consider to be the "Bushfire" drive. As in if a bushfire is coming then yank out that (Hot pluggable) drive and take it away.

I am looking into further backup for really important stuff off site.

[Merlin66]

Gary,
Thanks.
Yes I suppose it was more Archive than back-up....
Interesting question...when does a back-up become an archive?

[gary]

A backup is a copy of data stored on a separate device that you keep
reserved for recovery.

An archive is for keeping data that you have decided will no longer change
but want to retain indefinitely. For example, old photos.

You should still backup an archive.

Historically archives were often kept on some form of slow tertiary storage,
such as tape or optical disk. There was thus a trade-off between the
cost of storing each byte of data against how long it would take to retrieve
it. However, since hard drive storage has become so cheap,
archives are now typically stored on hard drives as well.

Cloud storage, in Australia at least, in some ways mimics the days
of tertiary storage devices. The limited bandwidth is the problem.
Currently we have to suck data through very narrow straws to get it
to or from the Internet. If we all had gigabit per second fibre connections,
as the original NBN FTTP plan provided a future for, the distinction in
access speeds between your own local area network and the cloud
would have shrunk so the two would appear seamless.

In any case, whatever backup strategy you use, make sure you have
a minimum of two copies of any piece of important data and make sure that
the backup process is as automated as possible. :thumbsup:

Good luck and I hope you can recover the family photos.

[lazjen]

CrashPlan.

After a few drives failing at times and fiddling with incomplete backups, I got CrashPlan and now have reliable backups. Local + offsite in the cloud. Multiple machines backed up with ease. The cost per year is worth it (about $150) for the simplicity and peace of mind.