Hard drive dies with all my astro images.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by mithrandir

Totally agree. For a bit under $2K I got a NAS and five 3TB NAS certified disks. It has 4 gigabit ethernet ports and USB3 and is set up as RAID-5. I have about 12TB of space available.

It is still wise to have a backup from that. RAID5 does not really offer redundancy as such.

If the software works as it is meant to it should operate with a failed drive and rebuild itself when you replace it. However unless you physically look at the NAS regularly or check on it via it's web interface you can miss a failed disc as they should tolerate it and stay online. The risk is that a second failed drive before you replace the first and the array finishes rebuilding means complete data loss.

Edited to add:We have an 8 bay NAS at home, four 4TB discs in RAID5 and one disc stand alone. The stuff we want backed up is backed up by software running on the PC's in question to a dedicated backup share each on the RAID array and then weekly there is an internal backup by the NAS of those shares to the stand alone disc. They are all hot pluggable so in case of an emergency we can also yank the stand alone disc and run with all the really important stuff to us. It also means that in the case of one of us landing a crypto locker virus we have up to a week to prevent it encrypting the stand alone back up, the stand alone disc is not visible to any of the desktops so any crypto locker can not directly encrypt that, we would have to miss seeing it and have the backup processes back up the encrypted versions of the files to the NAS (Not even sure if the backup software would/could) and miss that long enough for the NAS backup process to replicate it to the stand alone disc.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Holy thread necro, Batman!

H

[bojan]

It happened to me when external USB drive fell on the carpet from a chair...
At the first moment I thought everything was gone, but then for some reason I tried to have a look at it via TV (which runs under LINUX).
All the images were still there, and fully accessible.
So I installed LINUX on my PC, retrieved all on another USB drive... and after reformatting the first one, it turned out it was not physically damaged, so now I have two backups.

[Stonius (Markus)]

A separate NAS storage unit is a good idea. Synology currently make cheaper ones that are not too hard to set up.

Markus

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Octane

Holy thread necro, Batman!

H

Holy smoke, did not even spot it. Never a good idea looking at forums on a small screen, things like the date history are hard to spot.

Still data loss is a pretty contemporary subject any day of the week!

[Nath2099]

I'll place a vote for NAS RAID array. WD have one for $259 plus postage:
http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/N...FQGAvQodD5gIbg

Never buy anything Seagate would be my other advice!

[Stonius (Markus)]

Originally Posted by Nath2099

I'll place a vote for NAS RAID array. WD have one for $259 plus postage:
http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/N...FQGAvQodD5gIbg

Never buy anything Seagate would be my other advice!

Oh, man, +1 for 'Never buy anything Seagate'. They're the reason I had to find out about NAS's in the first place!

Note for anyone that has a Seagate 7200:11 or 12. Update the firmware while you still can! They brick themselves without warning because of errors in the firmware. <jaw twitches with painful memories>

-Markus

[wasyoungonce (Brendan)]

I use a HP-N54L Proliant server with stablebit drive extender and stablebit pool to be able to rebuild drives that fail and span drive. (qty 4 x 4 tb Hitachi coolspins). Plus a boot drive. When it fails I can then attst if it works as advertised!

But nothing is fool or fail proof. They only way is multiple backups methodology but even this misses.

Best advice.....if it's important make a backup, then another incrementing each other. I've actually changed HDD platters on old 286/386 system in the RAAF HTS test-stations. Big job (clean rooms) and prone to fail...let alone the new smaller high density platters.

Its a damn problem even today...cloud backup (or NAS cloud) is IMHO one of the best.

FWIW...remember if its too important to be lost then develop a backup procedure.

Brendan

[JB80 (Jarrod)]

My HD just went too, thankfully I transfer everything over to the PC and occasionally to a back up drive but it still annoys me as that is the second laptop gone under 6 months.

[Jeremy55]

I use an external hard drive and periodically reserve all my data.

[BeanerSA (Paul)]

The thread that just wont die. Unlike some of your hard drives.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

I've had two older mains powered external hard drives and one newer portable external hard drive die on me. I bought a kit off Ebay that lets me read them after I remove the hard drives from their covers and attach them to the connectors (IDE and SATA) and retrieve the data via a USB port.

The kit is thus very handy for reading faulty external drives where the electronics have stuffed up and the drive is okay, and for reading internal drives when the computer's motherboard has died and one wants to retrieve that data and put it on a new computer.
Regards,
Renato

[PCH (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

I've had two older mains powered external hard drives and one newer portable external hard drive die on me. I bought a kit off Ebay that lets me read them after I remove the hard drives from their covers and attach them to the connectors (IDE and SATA) and retrieve the data via a USB port.

The kit is thus very handy for reading faulty external drives where the electronics have stuffed up and the drive is okay, and for reading internal drives when the computer's motherboard has died and one wants to retrieve that data and put it on a new computer.
Regards,
Renato

What's the name and details of that item Renato? It seems like something to have in the cupboard that you hope you'll never need.