Catastrophic Drive Failure

[Amati]

Re: Catastrophic Drive Failure

While the topic of backups is being bounced around, what is the easiest and reasonably priced backup to use for a home computer (PC) that holds tax records, a ton of word documents (work related), and endless emails?

[MyopicJoe]

Re: Catastrophic Drive Failure

[HT just ate my post and I forgot to copy-paste before I hit the Submit button. I guess that's my version of a HD failure with no backup ]


*whistle*

Ouch

G'luck with that, Kungpao. Definitely not your fault. Stuff like that is typical at small companies. If the data isn't recovered, do you think everyone will be forced to take a "vacation"?

I've had a HD or two fail on me, but nothing critical. This guy lost 40 GB worth of photos from his Thailand trip. Cost him $300 to recover it.

I assume you folks with go with an off-site solution, after this. If you need an on-site solution, your company might want to consider a RAID setup (non RAID 0) and a number of UPS'es (one for the server and for any external drives).

[LocalMotion]

Re: Catastrophic Drive Failure

Check out Carbonite for off site backup....

[Leo Lakio]

Re: Catastrophic Drive Failure

These two sentences should never be uttered in the same discussion, especially in today's world, where computers are ubiquitous:

The information on the drive is Priceless.

No current backups.

Your boss should never have allowed that, and may have just learned a very hard lesson. "Priceless" just earned a price of $500-$2500.

Ouch.

[Kungpao]

Anyone ever had a really REALLY important drive fail on them?

We just did here where I work. It's classic. No current backups. In the process of getting pricing of off site backups, just a little too late. I'm technically the go to guy for IT stuff around here but really, I just like to tinker with PC's and it's not my primary job function. Nonetheless, I'm pretty distraught about it?!? Which is rather perplexing to me. Our office (Engineering firm) kept ALL our CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) drawings on an external 500Gb WD Mybook drive. Pretty much EVERYTHING our company does. This morning, 3 of us simultaneously said that we'd crashed out of our drawings. One of my other co-workers from across the room said "really? I crashed too". <-----those emoticons are perfect for what went through my brain.

SO...first thing that comes to mind is server connectivity. I log on to my remote administrator program and the server comes up with several failed to write errors on the drive... (deservedly an additional eek). I meander back to our server (which used to sit directly behind me till we got rearranged. To hear the drive clicking every other second. Mind you, i heard that baby clicking a good 10 feet away so it kind of annoyed me that our office manager who now sits where I used to did not hear it nor bothered to tell me that something didn't sound right.

After messing with it I decided to open her up and see if I could put it into my PC (as suggested through a web-site for possible causes of failure for that particular piece of reliable equipment) and that didn't work. More and more clicking.

Finally. I gave up and called our local computer gurus. They came straight away and took the drive so they can play with it and hopefully recover our data. If not, they're going to send it out to a 3rd party to recover data. Back to square one.

Any other Horror stories?







As I was about to hit submit, our computer people called. The drive is DEAD. They're sending it out to the third party people to diagnose it. Cost estimate $500-$2500. The information on the drive is Priceless. Had to make the call to my boss to let him know.