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A thief will rip off your computer, but never your photo albums. Food for thought.
Same applies in the event of a fire, it's much easier to rip out the USB cord and carry it out of the door.
So sorry about the loss of your mom's voice. That truly is tragic dude.
Peace
Dave
There are scenarios where I could lose a lot of data - my most vulnerable is my laptop - I really should do something about that. The new box I mentioned above also needs something better. My linux servers, though, all share the load and back each other up. I've got 2 boxes in one location and another offsite and they all have a decent amount of storage. I do nightly rsyncs among all three boxes, so I feel pretty good about those.
But the two Windows machines really make me nervous. As does the one external drive I used to use for video projects before I built the big desktop. Externals/poretables are just subjected to too much abuse to be trusted much.
Thanks for the reminder to double-check my backup routines to make sure stuff is really doing what I expect.
Now, you better never let that happen again!
P.S. One reason I like eMusic over iTunes is that I can re-download everything I ever bought for free.
for online backup, may i suggest amazon S3? you'll probably have to learn some programming magic, but it's pretty darn cheap. http://aws.amazon.com/
S3 does sound wonderful, but uplink speeds on modern broadband connections make it challenging for media, especially if you're editing.
Best,
Leo
That really sucks. I don't mean to minimize your loss in any way, and I feel for you -- I've lost stuff, too (one of my Maxtor drives failed), but I thought I'd point out a few things:
1. Drives fail. It sucks. But they do. Drives are rated with a mean time between failures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF). It's a MEAN time. Some drives will fail before that, some will last longer.
2. I'd point the finger of blame at the manufacturer of the actual drive mechanism. LaCie doesn't manufacture the actual hard drives. If the housing or the firmware or the external interface failed, I'd blame LaCie. My LaCie 1TB NAS device has two 500mb drives and both are Seagate ST3500630AS. As far as I know, the only companies manufacturing the actual drives these days are Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital. This reminds me of the time when people were blaming Ford for the bad Goodyear tires. Ford doesn't make the tires. LaCie doesn't make the drive.
Thanks for letting me know about Mozy. Seems like a good service.
I think you can get a 1 time redownload of your iTunes music. Thanks a lot for turning me on to Mozy and Drobo.
Spinrite is a low very level disk utility, and has recovered litteral thousands if not 100's of thousands of hard disks. It's saved my skin a few times and is well worth buying. I'll let you research it yourself, if you want to here more about it, listen to a Security Now podcast from twit.tv. The co-host Steve Gibson is the author and found of grc.com and spinrite.
Good Luck
Any reputable hard disk recovery set-up will offer a cost free assessment.
Secondly, the striping does make it more difficult. However, it is by no means impossible to recover data from a striped drive. Hell, a competent engineer can pull back stuff even if they only have 1 part of the array.
Personally, I've heard from people who have had drives recovered after water immersion, fire damage, dog attacks. Mechanical failure should be no issue for a reputable set up.
So in hopes you learn your lesson here is what I do. First I have an NAS device with 1 TB, this allows me to make complete copies of my MAC/Windows machines. Then I also copy my regular data to these machines. On top of this I use Mozy and Amazon S3 both to upload my data. I have no single point of failure so that if any of the four places my data is contained breaks I will always have a copy.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
You sir, with all due respect are an idiot.
I am really paranoid about the type of thing you said. I've heard too many stories of people's backups being bad and all-is-lost type of situation. With pretty much all of my life's memories being digital (I've gone digital a long time ago, storing all receipts, photos, CDs, etc digitally) if I were to suffer a data loss I agree - it would be devestating and $10k would be cheap to recover it.
My backup plan is as follows:
1. My main home PC hosts most of the active data. I have a normal HD - no RAID as that can sometimes make data recovery more impossible - not to mention if you do striping and not mirroring it doubles the chance of one hard drive taking out all of your data. If I had a lot of money I would probably do RAID mirroring of some sort.
2. I have a linux server in-house that acts as a file server. I back up all music, documents, and anything else I can think of to this server hourly or nightly depending on the type of data. Backup is unencrypted.
3. I have a portable hard drive I plug in once a month and back up most things to. This is then stored in a fire-proof safe in my residence. This backup is compressed and encrypted in case it is stolen.
4. I rent a dedicated server to which I back up to. This backup is done daily and is encrypted; and is located fairly far away from me to give some separation for any sort of natural disasters.
5. I backup my photos manually maybe twice a year onto DVD. This is in the off-chance that someone sets off an EMP which manages to wipe out all magnetic storage devices. I told you I am paranoid.
6. I backup all other information such as USB Key Drive and Laptop data to my main PC which is then eventually moved to the other backups.
The main software I use to do all of this is called SyncBack SE
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html
I highly recommend to all - you have not only scheduled backups but also backups based on when you insert a certain drive or other criteria.
Ryan
Their slogan is "No data, no charge" and they've lived up to that for the 11 years that I've done business with them. I don't work for them and I don't get paid for referrals. Ever drive I or any acquaintance of mine has ever sent them was fully recovered but if they can't recover -- unlike the other scum out there who charge $200-2000 just to look at the problem -- there's no bill.
Personally, I'd also recommend a version control system for settings and small personal files - Not only can you have one copy on each machine you use (same settings everywhere X backups), but you won't lose stuff you've deleted from the sandboxes.
Unfortunately you can't know what data loss is until it happens to you... I think your article will help a lot of people really think about it though, and hopefully some of the lucky ones will take action.
Here's my method:
http://www.christophercamps.com/archives/how-to...
good luck to you, and remember to keep it simple.
If all my hard drives were to fail simultaneously, i'd still have those discs.
The LaCie drive sounds like it was a RAID 0 of two 500 GB disks. In this sort of striping there is no redundancy and if one disk fails half the data is lost. Competence has nothing to do with it; an engineer can do nothing with only one part of the array.
Data loss does amount to losing a part of yourself, its impact is impossible to calculate.
Since you were doing all the right things before I don't think it's fair to blame you. You would expect a hard drive to last -some- time, right? My mishap also happened using a LaCie drive, which has soured me on the brand. I realise it could have happened with any brand, but it happened to be with a LaCie drive.
I'm using a backup on the second hard drive and I'm looking forward to using Time Machine for continuous backup on a separate medium once I get the new machine that will be my data repository, somewhere around January, if all goes right.
To all of you who share the experience, I extend my sympathies.
I am tempted to void the warranty and try to mount the drives myself. I heard no clicking, so I don't think it is a head crash or platter problem. I think the internal controller is kaput. double back-up, automated, (maybe the new osx time machine will help us all)
I use JD as well as an external 80GB for important documents.
Still sorry to hear about your data loss, man.
--Tim
You probably could have even setup your drives in a JBOD configuration to get the space and you would have only lost half your data. It probably would have been easier to recover the data off the bad drive too, if it wasn't RAID0.
I have little sympathy for you. You preached all this backup and redundancy but setup your two 500GB drives striped instead of mirrored.
Get back on your torrents and fill up your drives with movies and music again. It's not like you had a TB of Word and Excel docs. :)
I do not feel sorry for you...
Also, don't buy LaCie. They usually don't have enough vents, plus you never know what OEM, last-run drive is in there (could be a maxtor even). You are much better off going straight to Seagate. Don't be swayed by the pretty case. I think you can use the big disk as RAID 1 anyway.
So you are bitching and want us to feel sorry for you for putting a Striped RAID set in an easy-bake oven and losing all your data. Plus, you transferred from a mirrored RAID to this one... Did'nt you read the reviews? LaCie crap will screw up in days, sometimes hours.
Either way, this taught you to never do RAID 0. Hell you can loose everything on RAID 5, if the drives overheat. Mirror only.
You are needlessly cruel. I am NOT asking for anyone's sympathy. Did you read my entire post? I said I wrote it to vent, get advice from others and encourage other people to backup their systems.
I'm glad you felt compelled to comment on my blog, but I don't care if you feel sorry for me, and there is no need to put words in my mouth. I never demanded sympathy.
Also, I ran this LaCie as a temp measure for SIX WEEKS. I said in my post that I blame LaCie for the failure because that's a poor product. I also said I blame MYSELF for the data loss.
I hope that should any sort of tragedy befall you, even an avoidable one, that you are not treated in the rude, cruel and bitter manner by a complete stranger as you have treated me.
here is your comment:
A few things. If you are gonna run RAID, run RAID 1 or 5. NEVER RAID 0… NEVER… if you care about your data. Not even for a little while. RAID 0 should be used for SPEED ONLY! Like for your swap drive, or game data.
I do not feel sorry for you…
Also, don't buy LaCie. They usually don't have enough vents, plus you never know what OEM, last-run drive is in there (could be a maxtor even). You are much better off going straight to Seagate. Don't be swayed by the pretty case. I think you can use the big disk as RAID 1 anyway.
So you are bitching and want us to feel sorry for you for putting a Striped RAID set in an easy-bake oven and losing all your data. Plus, you transferred from a mirrored RAID to this one… Did'nt you read the reviews? LaCie crap will screw up in days, sometimes hours.
Either way, this taught you to never do RAID 0. Hell you can loose everything on RAID 5, if the drives overheat. Mirror only.
That is the one thing about storing everything digitally, you need backups and backups of backups.
The drive died within 14 days. He's very glad he did so.
I'm off to back up my system for the first time in about four months right now. Hope all goes well for you and whatever data you may or may not be able to restore.
Their tech support is great too.. I've had a couple of issues, and got personal responses both times..
Hope it helps....
The only hope of recovery from severe mechanical failure like this is a low-level recovery of the data, perhaps even at the magnetic flux level.
And I would add my recommendation for trying an outfit with lots of experience, like OnTrack Data Recovery. I've used them in the past, and while expensive (a relative term), their expertise at dealing with toasted drives is unparalleled.
Don't give up on it. Even if there isn't a way to recover the data right now, recovery technology makes strides like every other technology. Keep the bad drive for the day when it can be recovered. Good luck.
Hardware-wise, simple and reliable beats massive and complex. That is, I'd rather use several conventional 300GB drives to hold my data rather than a single large striped RAID unit. It's not elegant, it's not cutting-edge, but damn, it works when you need it.
Finally, for your _real, real_ valuable data -- the stuff you absolutely don't want to ever lose -- make a third-level back up onto some removable storage (DVD maybe, or miniDV data tapes). True, there isn't a removable storage media that is 100% stable, but again, this is a third-level backup "just in case". Hopefully, you'll never need it again.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
It sucks, but you can still recover your data - if you have another computer try accessing your hard drive with that - use Linux because it can detect things that OSx and Xp will ignore (they just assume it's gone for good).
Also if you have the money, you can send it away for repair or for extraction. There are some services (the best ones being about $1000 or under) that can get everything off your hard drive - they reverse engineer your hd and get the information. Nothing is lost except for some system and boot files - it's what the fbi and police use to get crucial data or evidence off of a suspects computer if it had failed or died or sabotaged. They have a lot of services that are meant for the public, I'm trying to think of the name of the most reputable one but the name escapes me.
Try out one of these services, maybe put up a donation box and people can donate a $1 or something to help with the cost of that. Good Luck
Get a simple hard drive and a USB adaptor for it and copy your data to it regurarely. That should do it.
hang in there
we weren't happy and neither were the customers who lost their data.
Plus, after you recover your data (or the slim slim chance of failure), running spinrite on good drives periodically will help prevent crashes, or tell you when the drive is about to go bad way before there is an actual problem.
http://journal.krhis.net/index.php/2006/12/18/h...
Right now I have a 320GB USB external hard drive which I have rsync scheduled to synchronize to every 8 hours. My only concern right now is if my house gets hit by lightning or (as you stated above) a freak incident of some type occurs. Worst case scenario something like that would destroy every piece of electronic equipment in my house.
Off-site backups are not ideal for me right now, but I am tempted to purchase another external hard drive and keep it in my safe.
Anyway, absolute proof this is not, but I'll continue my policy to avoid Lacie external drives. From my (obviously subjective) viewpoint. They suck.
Frankly.
It is great you have written this article.
If you are looking for some open-source backup software, consider LBackup . Please keep in mind LBackup is aimed at system administrators.
If you would like some help with your backups feel free to get in touch with one of our representatives.
Please accept our condolences for your loss.
All the best preserving your data,
The Lucid Team.
--
Lucid Information Systems
http://www.lucidsystems.org
2 weeks ago my harddrive pretty much blew up and I'm currently hunting for a replacement PCB in a desparate attempt to retrieve some data.
I've lost 5 years worth of holiday/Wedding photos/videos, 10 years worth of work, all my music and all my personal documents/emails.
A week before that, my camera's CF card got corrupted and I was so relieved that I had backed it up so I ordered some DVDs to write them to. The DVD's arrived the day after the harddisk blew. Next time I'll pay more for a faster delivery. :(
RAID != backup
RAID != backup
Do not fool yourself into believing that having RAID means you have a backup.
Oh wait, that guy was a total idiot.
My sympathies to you man, hard lesson learned, but you have got to LOVE hearing from these arrogant jackass' claiming they have avoided every possible technical problem known to man because of tehr aw3som3 stAr Tr3k l33t SkLlLz!
LOLOCAUST!!!1111
The clicking is normally a mechanical failure, technically it should be possible to remove the platters and put them in another drive of the same type.
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i always thought LaCie were supposed to be good but clearly this particular product is crap.
sorry for your troubles.
it's expensive and time consuming to double or triple backup.
pity drives won't just work for the amount of time they say on the tin.
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze...
Since then I made the effort to build a simple Linux server housing six drives I had around the place. I was just backing things up to one drive on the server every few days or so but your story has really struck a cord.
I now backup the backup to a second drive on the server, and important stuff goes offsite. I use gmail for my email and now back that up using Thunderbird. I'm also going to take up another commenter's suggestion (Dave) of backing up digital photos to DVD every few months.
So thank you, I've learnt from your mistake and you may have saved me the same hardships in the future.
Though until now I had no problems with my hard drive, I had to restore documents that I mistakenly saved with the wrong changes - this is where saving multiple versions of the same document helps.
It was painful, all that work put into the photos, videos etc.
But one thing for sure, the crashing made my life easier.
I didnt have to organize all those rubbish I had.. It was soo much easier to let go off things that i kept just for keepsake...I didnt have to look at something twice and think about whether I should have thrashed it.. It was abit of a relief that I lost all that...but i tried to reenact what Ive lost and tried to keep it in my long term memory of whatever pictures or data I remembered, and either redownloaded them, or put them alll in my mental memory.
now all backed up to strongspace via a nifty rsync command.
rsync -azvCL --exclude=.DS_Store --progress ~/docs/ joe@joe.strongspace.com:/home/joe/docs/
wish i'd done the same to my fiancee's laptop before that went postal, damn thing near blew up.
Just yesterday, I lost my USB thumbdrive, it has all my recent work I did for programming and Computer graphics. I haven't even submitted them. And I don't have any backup. I tell myself, "If I can do all that work the first time round, I definitely can do it again, and perhaps in a different way"
What i've learned is... ONLY USE EXTERNAL DRIVES FOR BACKUP PURPOSES!!!!!!1111!!11 Have you ever noticed how external drives, even while composed of just REGULAR hard drives in a cheap enclosure, only sport a 1-2 year warranty, as compared to the drives themselves which carry a 3-5 year warranty? Strange? Not really. The manufacturers KNOW they aren't going to last very long!
I have a copy of my data on my PC (and/or online @ Streamload (now MediaMax) which btw used to be a wonderful service with unlimited storage space but has since been reduced to a comical excuse for a data storage provider, trying to proclaim their commitment to sharing MP3s and Videos around the world, which i'm guessing is just a gimmick to try and win new customers - i've got about 500GB of data stored there, which should be about 5TB but their "new and improved" backup tool hasn't been updated in 2 years and rarely works with files > 100MB i.e. pretty much everything on my hard drives). Anyways i've got 12TB of data and though on my current budget of 1 new hard drive per month, it's impossible to back everything up, but i do what i can. One day i'll build another box with a 2nd phat RAID-5 and copy sync everything over there... until that happens, i've got single 500GB drives (cheap as dirt) which i manually (eww) plug-in, and do my backups of critical data to.
I use a backup system of two separate Western Digital MyBook Firewire drives and Chronosync for the mac to back up my data. This system does a great job of building an archive of older files and, between the two of them, can hold 500 gigs redundantly. The drives aren't connected to eachother so I don't have to worry about losing much. I also have a separate USB portable disk to store my 40gb of local important data which goes to a safety deposit box.
There is a philosophy I hold called the "spheres of backups" which lets me decide which of my data is core data I can never lose and which is data I don't mind losing. If I lost all my music and movies, I can always get that back. My own writing, my father's writings, my father's audio recordings, my own digital photos; those I can never recover. They're also a lot smaller in size so its easier to back up.
I feel for you. Those Lacie striped drives are real trouble.
I would recommend contacting Apple -- they can allow you to re-download all of purchases, but they only let you do this once on your account.
Give it a shot.
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/
Richard
There's nothing wrong with Raid 0 at all, provided you have a fallback data point, which he did.
You really are picking at hairs, and on a fly without wings too.
Richard
Of course, if two recovery agencies failed to retrieve any data, then it's quite likely that at least one head started scraping it's the platter. Some of the data is going to be unrecoverable, but with any luck you'll get back the data that you value the most.
Also, Ontrack DOES have the reputation of being the best in their field. If you can afford it, give them a try.
i don't like to spread negativity but in this case i feel i must point out to cecil that you sir are a colossal loser.
best of luck baratunde
But still, i have suffered from this before bout 1.5 years ago. 2 Years of digital pics dissapeared, that is 2004 and half of 2005. Thank god I recovered the rest of em.
I've got several external USB drives for backup. I've used spinrite for twenty years now. It's brilliant software. Spinrite at Level 5 restored four unusable drives over that time period, and I saved my Dad's pc TWICE with spinrite- readable long enough to mirror the drive and replace it with the new one.
I use Acronis drive software and Karen's Replicator for batch and on-off backups.
It took me about a month, but I finally all my data on Mozy as well (115GB). That is really just a backup of my 2 external 250GB firewire HD's in RAID-1.
But just like you I think I'll be grabbing a Drobo soon, the thing just looks so awesome. I just wish they have a 1Gbit Ethernet version.
I've used portable hard drives and dual layer DVD for backup. Given the amount of data you need to save, I would go with a hard drive strategy. Hitachi has a new 1 TB drive on the market. I would buy a couple of those and external drive kits. Just swap using those drives in a two week cycle ( Use Drive A in Week 1, Use Drive B in Week 2...).
A simple strategy like this is more workable because it provides a reasonable level of protection, is relatively cheap and is simple enough process that you will continue to use it over the long term. You also never lose more than a week's worth of data as it's highly unlikely you lose two drives in different systems at the same time.
( Remember to hide the drives from a simple search in case you get burglarized )
Good luck.
Granted, it's going to take you forever to upload....but in the event of a failure, you could sure suck it down really fast!
Thanks for the post. Good luck! I definitely will back up my drive now.
I can also SSH in to my file server from any computer and retrieve / drop-off documents from off-site, which is very convenient.
tb mentioned the Infrant ReadyNAS and it seems like a solid product. I'm still in "evaluation mode" with the NV at work and if things go as well as I expect them, I'll likely add this NAS to my home environment.
Good luck with everything!
And my deepest sympathies about the audio of you and your mom. That really is terrible.
i myself had a lot and long time with backup problems
after i lost 2 weeks of work, i now backup to
a) second hdd installed on stand-top PCs
b) backup on external USB hdd
i need to find a c to backup some data remotely
i hope data storage continues to get a lot cheaper...
i heard about the crystal storing devices via nano-technology, its now about 3 years old, they can easily store around 50 terabytes in 1 cubic-cm
but unfortunately its just prototype.... and who knows if that ever breaks through (monopolies dont want innovations to kill them.....)
For the best result take the bad disk (or even both disks) out of the external box and put it (them) inside your machine.
Spinrite really is the best tool around for data recovery.
You've got nothing to loose and all that data to gain. Its $89 but if it doesn't work then just email Steve Gibson who writes it and he will refund your money.
At least try it! ... and let us all know how you get on.
you wrote "You might want to try sticking the drive in the freezer next time, the clicking is often cause by warping and putting a drive in the freezer can help. Keep it in a plastic bag though."
I actually DID try that. It was just an instinct. Didn't work, but thanks. You also have the BEST comment ever. Err is flicking me off. So appropriate.
@JonHenshaw
you wrote: "Drivesavers doesn’t cost that much (you said $6,000 is what they quoted you). It cost me about $2,000. You can read about my data recovery experience and also get a 10% discount from Drivesavers. Seriously, it shouldn’t cost you more than $2,000 max through Drivesavers"
Thanks. I had a 20% discount with them actually, because I came through a Tekserver referral. The reason for the expensive quote was a) the vast AMOUNT of data. nearly 1 terabyte and b) the nature of the data a RAID stripe.
@everybody
amazing, amazing response. yall are the best. i will give spinrite a shot cause why not? but I doubt it will work. Drivesavers disassembled the joint in a clean room. I may also give OnTrack a shot.
I've suffered a few substantial losses, and one major loss in my life, and I view them with mixed emotions. During my early college days I had a large mp3 collection, as well as some early internet video clips (I especially remember this one Star Trek TNG edit where Picard gets drunk and hits on Crusher -- I still have yet to recover it from anywhere else on the net). There were also all of my college papers, and various other things that served as a digital remembrance of my life. Then, in 2005, when moving to Japan, I lost BOTH my main hard drive AND back up when I stupidly shipped them in the same international package. I lost hundreds of memorable photos and home videos, and I really mourn the loss of those as well, still to this day.
On the other hand, in a way I'm ambivalent towards the loss of certain things. Now, before you read this, open your mind a little because it's gonna sound nuts, but I think that the loss of knowledge and memories can to some degree be a good thing. Of course if I were presented with an opportunity to wipe things from my memory I think I would instinctively decline, but yet, I am very fond of the quote by Peter Parker's friend Harry in Spiderman 3, where he says "one bump on the head and I'm free as a bird".
In my life I've watched my grandparents and other family members torture themselves through obsessive clinging to old artifacts and memories. They live/lived their life more in the past than the present, and I felt a great swell of sympathy for them when certain ones would walk hopelessly around from a newspaper pile, to a photo pile, to a book pile, and just simply not know what to do with themselves.
Until my mid-20's (I'm 29 now), I myself had a habit of pointless organizing and cataloguing, and keeping things that I would never use just "in case". I had enormous movie collections of movies that I didn't really like that much, and I clogged up my computer with years of things that I convinced myself needed to be retained.
When I realized how much time I was devoting to such obsessive pack-rat activities, I promised myself that I would not end up like my grandparents, and that I would balance memories with the present, and be honest with myself about what things REALLY mean to me, and when I'm fooling myself. Now I rent DVDs instead of buy... and only the cream of the crop - the real golden classics - make up my collection.
The way I see it, ultimately the only real limiting factor in our lives is time. Use it wisely, and live life.
And your comedy is really amazing. The YouTube clip made laugh out loud.
Great post but sad as well, I know how that feels, I had a sister and she died, the only thing i had with her voice was a cassette tape, and i lost that somehow.
The Infrant NAS is, in my opinion, a far superior solution to the Drobo. I have them both sitting side by side now and the difference is remarkable. Because you have a lot of video and audio (as do I) the Drobo will prove intolerably slow over the USB connection. Plus, I have more than 1 computer on my home network and the Infrant is NAS ready where as the Drobo only works with a single device.
Anyhow, I don't get paid to dispense this advice, so I'll shut up. Good luck.
I did research and found Ontrack to be one of the better companies to restore data. ( http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com ) The problem with my driver was the motor arm had failed and the on board electronics some how fried so there was no damage to the plates. I had about 500gb of data, and that cost me about $2,000 to get all my data back.
In your case, it might play out differently, But from what I have heard from others and the homework I did. Ontrack is a surefire company that can get any and all possible data back to you. I do be leave they are a little more expensive compared to others, but as long as the plates are not broken in haft, I would recommend going with them
And, you want to go back to the old RAID0 setup again. YOu haven't learned anything. Keep making the same dumb mistakes!!!
_brett.
you might also try getting a safe deposit box, for local off-site storage. I've been meaning to get one to keep a spare copy of my DVDs with pictures on them. They're not too much and they're secure.
I feel for you. I didn't loose as much important data, but I've lost a lot of data I just didn't have spare money to keep backed up.
I wouldn't quite give up on the Lacie drive yet, I think it is salvagable.
You may want to try and use Ontrack Data Recovery, I have used them personally, it was a single hard drive with the dead voice coil just like your drive. I sent it to them and they where able to move the platters from one drive assembly to another, they would email me updates as everything happened and what they where doing next. In the end it cost me about $2500 but all the data was saved the entire hard drive. I understand that the memories are worth more than anything, and it may be something to consider.
Best of luck to you.
Rule number one of hardware failure related data recovery: KEEP THE DEVICE OFF!
Take care, man.
I feel sorry for your data and memories....
I have a Samsung 100Gb by my side that doesn't want to turn on anymore... :(
Just in case it's not late and you still have your Lacie drive,
try http://www.myharddrivedied.com/
I've seen some videos on youtube and the guy seems pretty serious on data recovery....
I managed to find a backup from 2004, recovered all my music off my recently purchased AppleTV, as well as some decent resolution photos, but I lost a bunch of other data that is irreplaceable. I too am now setting up a redundant backup system, and will finally sign up for Mozy as well. I wish I had months ago when I first heard about it. Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.
The grief is real. Odd as it sounds, people don't understand it until it happens to them.
One word of caution to people. If your drive fails, and it's your only copy, STOP USING IT send it to DriveSavers or another reputable service IMMEDIATELY. I really think trying initial recovery on my own that only made things worse.
Head crashes does not destroy ALL data, you can lose some but not all. Platters cannot collapse. They sit on the spindle. Even if you disassemble your hard drive, and take out spindle with platters and apply all your force to platters they wont collapse. I know because I tried it.
Then people are saying that they lost all their data due to a hard drive crash, it is only partially true. The data will be on the platters until you destroy them. But for some people it's not feasible to spend $10,000 to recover their data.
Some governments and special institutions have policies of how to destroy the hard drive and data on it.
Good luck.
P.S.
Give these guys a shot http://www.actionfront.com/.
I journal everyday, but in the meantime, I will send all my photos out to print!!
I recently said enough is enough and backed up for the first time all my digital life recorded over the last 13 years.
I too got a LaCie but I immediately switched it from raid0 to raid1. There should be big warning stickers on those units about the default raid0 mode.
I feel your pain. It happened to me late last year. =[ Lost all my artwork, my pics, my music and music collection. Shame on me. Now, i am backing all my photos on Flickr (worth every penny), the Music i have it on two drives plus my MP3 player, and my artwork and my music ... well, most of it is gone =[ Gotta get over it and start again. =]
I gotta learn how to do a mirrored RAID drive setup. Can't really understand how to go about it. It would be great if you document the whole process to show us how to do it ourselves.
If you want more info on where to send, let me know.
I can sparsely imagine how hard it must have been for you, worst I’ve ever suffered data loss wise is an important Excel file which I accidentally overwrote, and that was only lots of numbers and formulae! I managed to get most of it back, but was up all night frantically doing so. Even that was draining, so I see how hard it must have been for you.
Have been reading around your Blog, think I might well subscribe! Hehe, stay happy.
Alex
you had a good setup too, worst possible scenario. At the 1 weak point you got hit.
Sorry man.
I'll put together a post on my site dodoskido.com soon about my current setup. Here's the rundown:
One Infrant NV Networked RAID with 1 Terabyte in X-RAID configuration (basically 3 500GB drives with one serving as a parity drive). This is used as the "My Documents" folder for my server at home. This is also where my Miro (formerly Democracy) downloads go.
Nightly, the photos, music, and documents are backed up to two local 300GB hard drives that are attached to the server. These two drives are constantly being backed up to Mozy. I have sent up about 100GB to them already with a bit more to go in the music department. I prioritized documents, family photos, then music by only activating some folders at any given time for Mozy to backup.
Flickr serves as a secondary (or tertiary) backup to my photos.
So I figure that with 2 separate local copies of important stuff, plus mozy, and another copy of photos on flickr, I'm pretty safe. I do plan on getting another NV in the future to serve as a local mirror of my networked NV . That way if one drive in either, I can use the other as my backup while I get a replacement drive for the failed NV .
1) Happy Birthday!
2) I too had a tragic data loss in 2004. Sadly, it was user error- and I HAD a backup... I tried a disk utility on the backup data first, it seemed to work, but I only found out it didn't when I had already tried it on my main data. Kaboom. Even if you have a backup, DON'T RUSH when trying something new or potentially dangerous! (This is also an advertisement for offline off-site backups of crucial stuff.)
3) Once you have a backup job/drive/etc. set up, YOU MUST TRY IT TO MAKE SURE IT IS ACTUALLY WORKING. Do the data equivalent of a fire drill. Boot with the backup disk. Retrieve the data from Mozy or whatever and try to use it. Do a sanity check on a random assortment of directory sizes and modification dates, compare with the backup. The worst thing would be to think you have everything backed up only to find out crucial stuff is missing...
eSATA drives are very close to performance of SATA internal drives. The only problem is that you need eSATA PCI adapter if your motherboard does not have eSATA port.
I hope that through all this publicity, you will find some data restore company who will be willing to make your case a pro bono example of how great they are at restoring things (hint, hint).
Advice for others who are thinking about how to solve the backup problem:
I recently needed to increase my storage capacity, and looked at the Drobo. I really like the idea, since it takes away some of the awkwardness of RAID, and adds some nice features, at the (I think) small price of speed. Ultimately I decided to wait until the price comes down a bit, and until they make a Network Drobo. Instead, last weekend I bought two new 500 GB external hard drives for backup.
This means I have my data on my computer, with weekly backup to external hard drive at my house, and quarterly (or so) backup to external hard drive at a friend's house. If I add some significant data (when my son is born, perhaps), I can do backups more frequently.
In case of mechanical failure I would lose up to 1 week's worth, and in case of theft or fire I would lose up to a few month's worth of data. I like this solution because it's cheap, and self sufficient; I don't rely on some website or service.
Good luck everyone...
Kudos for getting noticed on this issue. I think it's something that plagues every one of us techies at some point or another. I definitely have been through this and it *isn't* a pleasant experience.
One solution I use, just for the really important things (1-2gb), is box.net. Try them out, they're a startup thats doing some great things in the online storage community.
Thanks again for a convincing and successful blog!
Jake
More recently I purchased a Network Attacked Storage device, with mirrored drives in an attempt to prevent it ever happening again. The power supply unit died spectacularly, and at the moment I'm waiting to have it replaced under warranty, but I've got no idea as to the state of my data. I'm hoping against hope that everything is OK.
Unless you've got unlimited funds it's very hard to be safe.
I was looking at Drobo myself but I wanted a NAS so went for Thecus N5200PRO. Much better than Infrant in terms of speed and capabilities.
Sorry for your loss. I consider my data to be my priced possession, so I can imagine what you went through. Glad you got some part of it back.
But anyway, I'm sorry for your painful situation. Take comfort in knowing that your loss is helping a lot of others in terms of awareness.
Thanks for posting this, hope everything goes well in the future! Keep your mother in your memories and in your heart - thats the best backup of all :)
Personally I back up all really important stuff to hard copy. Printed and/or archival cdr or dvdr and put that in a waterproof/fireproof box.
Please buy another drive and back up your NAS, or you can (read: will sooner or later) suffer the same fate.
Just clearing up some things:
- Drobo is NOT RAID and is NOT NAS
- Infrant ReadyNAS is both RAID and NAS
- Thecus N5200PRO is both RAID and NAS
Let me repeat that:
- Drobo is NOT RAID
- All other drives mentioned in comment 151 = RAID
The beauty of the Drobo is that it's data aware, and does not rely on a physical RAID chip. This gives it some advantages in terms of the disks you can use in it, but that's it. Neither Drobo nor a RAID solution is a substitute for backups, however tempting it would be to think so.
One other good thing to do is Clone your Macbook Pros hard drive. While this is't a backup of files it will help you get up and running quickly if you laptop's drive dies. You can just boot off the clone. SuperDuper is a great way to do this. Best of all it's free to clone.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDup...
I don't buy LaCie products anymore...
Hope it helps, also I didn't read your whole page, I have gone through it too, dont want to rehash bad memories...
WD makes a 1TB dual-disk as well, and I would not recommend any such device unless you have another backup which sort of defeats the purpose. however WD's single-disk externals seem to be pretty reliable.
Yes, they are expensive. But, if you would have been willing to pay whatver it takes, at least you will know the cost before they preform the recovery.
If you still have the hardware, it certainly would be worth the $100 deposit to have them take a look at it. You may be happy with the results.
Trust me...they have saved my butt on more than one occasion, even with the unbelievable odds of a two drive simultaneous RAID failure.
If it were me, I still wouldn't trust spanning on the Glyph. I would put it in JBOD mode and use diskutil to create a RAID 1 in software. Cuts your capacity in half, but you won't have to worry about some freak accident on one of the drives when you take it out of the safe and spin them both up. Unfortunately, I'm not a Mac guru, so I couldn't tell you much more about the details, but I'm sure you could find someone who's experienced with it.
At my job, I have about 4TB (and counting) of MRI/EEG data etc.... I do the equivalent thing with Linux, RAID 5, and larger JBOD boxes (when you go up in capacity, and know you can purchase something that's just a dumb box as opposed to one with all the friendly features of the Drobo, prices are really *quite* low considering... which is nice because it means writing fewer grants :-))
For additional backup, there's a combination of tape and external HDs, and we're gradually mirroring things on a large professionally-managed storage array. At home, I use Brackup to put my important stuff (encrypted) on Amazon S3 -- I'm totally a command-line guy and I love it, but I've never heard from anyone on a Mac how well it runs there. Might want to check it out though.
And in case any readers are searching: the Infrant is aight, but not spectacular. I just don't trust proprietary "better-than-RAID" in general. Does NFS well though!
Also, everyone: take however much storage you think you need. Buy twice that much. Unless you're just talking about a media jukebox, I cannot overemphasize the utility of snapshots (LVM, Time Machine, VSS...). Disk is cheap. You can make use of it. Really, it's great. No, this is not a substitute for physical redundancy and backups.
I have a 60gb macbook. I mirror it (?correct word) once or twice a week to an identical sized external firewire drive. I've then got a bootable perfect copy of my laptop drive that's never more than a few days out of date.
I continuously backup my important files in the background to both an offsite destination (in the the sky for all I know, but I've checked and it's there) and to a windows computer in my house which is pretty much always turned on. My important unique data (documents/unique music/photos) only amounts to about 20gb as most of the music can always be got again. Also, much of the unique data doesn't change from day to day so internet bandwidth isn't an issue for the offsite uploading.
Combine these two methods and it's pretty close to bullet proof and quick to recover as well.
I haven't really thought how this would scale up. I don't think it would be as good for people who have huge changes in data from day to day.
I hope this long winded suggestion is appropriate in the comments.
A Norwegian company called IBAS is a greatly awarded company that does data recovery. They have even successfully done recovery of data from disk that has burned.
They have done a great amount of work for the police, private investigators, etc.
If you're willing to give it a shot they have departments over in USA.
Check it out at
http://www.ibas.com/america
I'm sorry for your loss!
I'm sorry for your mom's clips. :(
also lost a LOT of porn hahaha
You could have bought two Lacie's and put them in mirror configuration and put half on each then you would have had a portable redundant backup. I am doing this currently with a mybook as I find internal raid setups to be a pain in the ass constantly.
My laptop's HD died suddenly in the spring. I lost all, got a new HD and started over. I keep meaning to do a backup but have never gotten to it. I know I would be kicking myself if I lost all the pics of my son's first 4 years! Tonight I will make sure I have backups...
Shame about the detractors, guess they've NEVER regretted later something they did or failed to do! Must be nice to be perfect...
Thank you for sharing your experience for others to realize how important it is, you will probably save many people from having to go through the same thing.
Best wishes for you...
In any case, about a year ago I experience another one of those catastrophic losses but fortunately this time I was prepared. The losses were very minimal, almost negligible, because of the precautionary measures I took.
I wrote about it on my blog, about what you can do to save yourself from losing your data when you have a hard drive failure. And don't forget sometimes it can be more than just a hard drive failure. It can be a full computer failure. A power surge across your whole house. A house burning down or being burglarized. Either way there are many levels of data loss, and I've been working to minimize them all. You can find the article at: http://www.followsteph.com/2006/07/03/4-simple-...
Best of luck with your new setup!
Second, i share your concern about losing data due to bad hard drives. Year or so ago, i lost my data too and after that, i am almost paranoid everytime my HD makes any noise. Im waiting for the new prependicular drives to show up and see how reliable they are.
You can build a RAID5 setup from newegg.com for cheap check out this controller N82E16816115029 and this hard drive N82E16822145137. If you get 4 hard drives you'll have 1.5TB of space with one drive being the parity drive.
The only way this drive setup can fail is if multiple drive failures occur at the same time. As long as you keep them cooled the likelihood of this happening is extremely small.
http://www.stellarinfo.com/contact.htm
Take care.
I lost some photos, documents, video footages, I always think, it's really important to back up all these datas, but I think I'm too lazy to do it all. Of course, after hearing your story, I think I will at least backup some of the most important memories from my hard disk, but it's really difficult to keep everything backup, especially data is so huge these days!
I'm now back in Lhasa, I think I'll have plenty of time to see what I need to backup...
Thanks and all the best.
I remember an instructor at a college once state, "Save. Save often." Well, I now know, "Back up. Back up often."
Yet, knowing this I have meandered back and forth with questions of uncertainty: What will be my next purchase will be for a desktop? Was my recommendation to wait for Mac OS X Leopard with its Time Machine feature a correct suggestion for my parents? Do I buy a mirrored external hard drive for my fianceé?
Reading your article, Mr. Thurston, has thankfully reaffirmed my resolve. I will purchase a Mac Pro with a RAID array. And yes, my recommendation for my parents to wait for OS X Leopard was correct (I can then suggest an external hard drive and UPS for them). Yes, a UPS and an external hard drive for my fianceé is a good idea as well.
All in all, I am most certainly glad I read your article. Thank you for sharing your painful and time-consuming experience. Oh, and happy belated birthday!
Peace.
Your ultimate backup should be on optical disks; the National Institute of Standards and Technology thinks that CD-R and DVD-R disks will last 30-100 years, that is, long after you have equipment to read them.
Put 2 DVD burners in your desktop. The best ones on the market today are $30 or $40, which probably means a short life, but you have 2 and they’re cheap. If you can afford it buy one DVD±RW DL and one Blue-Ray rewriter. One DVD DL stores 8GB and a BlueRay disk 25GB.
Don’t back up, just copy (to DVD DL or BD) *folders* of your important writings and performances, your financials, your emails and personal photos. Categorizing the files onto separate disks will make the collection more interesting and useful. As you go along, duplicate each disk. Keep one copy on a shelf in your closet. Keep the other copy in large climate-proof plastic “neat box” and store it in a relative’s house across town (but not in a flood plain).
This sounds tedious, but it’s you, man. Your career is on those drives. Besides, while the disks are burning, you can lay back and listen to music on your stereo, or use up your cellphone minutes, or whatever.
Notice I have no brief for online storage. Those are also magnetic media on hard drives of unknown brands. The files can be hacked or stolen. If the company goes bankrupt or you can’t pay the bills, who knows what will happen to your files.
Some day you will get out the BlueRay disks, fire up the antique BlueRay player, and entertain your greatgrandchildren. Which brings us back to the kids’ never being able to hear their greatgreatgrandmother’s voice. That is sad. ——Solo Owl
I've been there, twice. The first time I lost 8 gig of files (big by 1995 standards), then again in 2005 when my PC was stolen. Last year, I set out to find a way of backing up all of my important files in a way that was completely automatic, highly redundant, instantaneous, transparent and cheap.
I stumbled upon FolderShare (recently acquired by Microsoft, http://www.foldershare.com), which runs on Windows 2000/XP and OSX a synchronizes files over a LAN or over the Internet with no network configuration (works behind NAT and everything). I went out and bought 4 old Dell towers from a computer fair, fitted WiFi cards, installed a 2TB RAID in each. One is in my garage, one at each of my parent's houses (250 and 270 miles away respectively) and the fourth in a friend's basement. This means that if any of my Mac or Windows machines need a new HD (or if I buy a new machine) all I have to do is install Foldershare, point it to my documents folder and let it automatically sync from the 4 backup machines as well as my three desktops and laptop - my family and friends can do the same. This also means I can seamlessly stop work on a document on one machine and pick it up on another a few seconds later. Definitely worth looking at if you want a backup solution that's easy, reliable, redundant and cheap to run. The only real expense was the HDs. All my friends with multiple machines run this now - if not for the convenience, then for the peace of mind knowing your data is safe (or safer, at least).
Peace.
Thanks for the advice, the tips, links, everything. Most is over my head. I found your post looking for what kind of mp3 or ipod I want to buy (I bought one of the first ipods ever- and need a new one or something like it) and then dealing with (7 yrs later) the bigger project of not just having an mp3 or ipod, but converting about 1000 cds to the best option, where to store them (then to you, searching for best ways to back up those cds).
Any suggestions? I'm thinking of an 8GB Creative Zen, using freeware to "rip" the cds, and then saving them onto a back up HD. What do you recommend for an mp3 player purchase? I want to have maximum storage and quality, and, what also, what HD for backup of holding all of my CDs? I've never done this before. Only put a 6 hr. playlist onto a 2002 ipod for training for and running a marathon. All I still have is that playlist/old ipod, and, 1000+ CDs and interest in having more than an old playlist on an old ipod...... and no experience really (someone helped me start saving onto the ipod and I did it in one day for that 6 hr. playlist).
Also- if you want to recommend a good resource for my questions if you wouldn't normally advise on that sort of thing, send 'em my way and thanks in advance.
Nice posting. As everyone suggest we should make a backup of our hard drive to avoid data loss. But what if you possess data loss after all precaution. Don't panic, stellar phoenix data recovery is a perfection solution to recover your data and backup.
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