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I knew better! I even read the previous thread to the same effect. Last week I bought a tera byte external hard drive. The two previous hard drives have worked fine for over a year. This one crashes within a week. Most of my photos are up on the net in facebook and photobucket. But I have some family tree material that was only on that drive. Why o why didn't I back it up on more than one drive. I guess because I was proud to have a T byte of free space.
Warning! Warning! Back up on more than one drive or face consequences.
I tried the freezer trick to no avail. I'm going to take to a friend in computer business and try to get a recovery. I called the professionals, quoted $500 to $2,400 for a T Byte. I only had 110 Giga byte on the drive, but it was important stuff.
If the drive does spin up? I have had success with a program called SpinRite **Home of Gibson Research Corporation** on disks that at first seemed totally inaccessible by any means an operating system can offer. The program runs independent of the OS, and accesses drives at a much lower level repairing sectors independent of the file system. Will even fix Apple and TIVO hard drives if they are first connected to a PC.
Can't hear anything. Quiet as a church mouse. However, I'm taking the drive to a friend in the computer business and than when I get enough space, I've used up to much space on my other hard drives, I'm going to do a system restore and retrieve my lost data. I have a plan! Then I'm going back to Office Depot and get a better hard drive. The hard drives that have worked well are Western Digital. This new one was a Verbatim.
There is a 2nd way to recover data.. if you.. haven't written to much over the original hard drive you moved or copied data from.. you can recover the data sometimes from the deleted files.. (I've done this twice recently.. myself.. because I've corrupted good data etc.)
Of course this means you need expensive programs like Ontrack Easy Recovery (use this one a lot) or Getbackdata (not super expensive.. but I digress I use this one a lot less in field work and personal)
You can use DVD for "A" backup but if you use for "the" backup you're playing with fire especially for long term storage. There is few things to keep in mind about writable DVD's, first and foremost be sure to use quality media. The "bargain" discs can have failure rates as much as 50%. Do not fill the disc to capacity, leave about half a gigabyte empty. Corruption when it happens is more likely to occur at the end of a burn. Lastly you're burning into a chemical that will eventually break down over time leaving the data unrecoverable. This can happen in a fairly short time or possibly take a very long time, people have had discs go bad in as short a time as 1 year. Your DVD burner, the burning software or even the firmware can also play a role in how well writable discs are written.
The bottom line is don't store anything on DVD unless it's expendable.
Warning! Warning! Back up on more than one drive or face consequences.
Just to clarify, having a backup implies that you have 2 copies of your data, one on the computer, another on some other type of media. Backing up to a second drive might be overkill for most, but you can't be too safe
If the drive does spin up? I have had success with a program called SpinRite **Home of Gibson Research Corporation** on disks that at first seemed totally inaccessible by any means an operating system can offer. The program runs independent of the OS, and accesses drives at a much lower level repairing sectors independent of the file system. Will even fix Apple and TIVO hard drives if they are first connected to a PC.
I've owned SpinRite through many versions. It is an excellent tool as is anything from Gibson Research. IMHO, Steve Gibson is one of the smartest people in the computer business when viewed over the many years he has been working in it.
I back up critical data to a server on the web. It holds my business pages and has tons of free space. I use FTP Explorer to copy QB data, email data, basically anything I'm worried about losing to these servers. I also do multiple backups of large data blocks to CD or DVD and send them to friends who store them for me. The really critical stuff is also copied to a separate hard drive that is stored elsewhere.
Not that I'm paranoid or anything...
I agree with the previous posters regarding Gibson. Really excellent tools.
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