Just another day in paradise....

[Rich Z]

Things have been hectic enough around here, and when I think I'm about to buckle under the load, I get another truck load of crap dumped on me.

Started when I saw this little notice on the screen of my PC saying something like "backup failed on drive F:..." No big deal, I figured, as the software probably glitched. So later I went to look at some files on that F: drive (it holds all my data, like photographs and videos and such), and the system couldn't find it. Hmmm.. Well reboot the system... During the power on sequence, I noticed the RAID utility flashing "ERROR" for that array. Uh oh.... This array is a pair of Seagate 1TB drives set up in RAID 0 to make a total volume of 1.8 terabytes. I quickly filled up that 500gb drive that came with the system, so I figured I had better give myself some elbow room. Putting two drives in RAID0 gives you the capacity of both combined, plus gives the drive a speed boost because it is sharing the write between two drives. So each drive only has to work half as hard as a single very large drive. Yeah, sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? The drawback is that if one of the two drives fails, everything on both drives is lost.

So, that is what happened to me, apparently.

Fortunately those Seagate drives were less than 30 days old, so I just yanked them out of my PC, took them back to Best Buy and exchanged them for a pair of Western Digital. Certainly not something I planned on having to do today, but tomorrow and the next several days were not going to be any better. Since my 30 days would be up next Monday, I just had to make time to do this.

So here I am waiting for a format of a 1.8 terabyte hard drive to complete so I can try out a restore function from this backup software I've been running. Never had to use it before, so this is going to be REAL interesting. The problem with backups of this nature is that you never really test them, because to do so would likely destroy your real data if that restore fails for some reason. So you only get to test it when you REALLY, REALLY need it to work. Of course, Murphy's Law is seldom very kind and understanding.

Not really how I had hoped today would go at all.........

[C5Rick]

I have a second hard drive that I store music and a few movies on. Four weeks ago I went to play an album and I could locate the drive, but it appeared empty After a couple of checks I verified it was empty
500 gigs of music gone. I reformatted the disc and it seems to be working ok, so back to downloading some albums.
I use Maxtor drives Never tried Seagate and didn't like WD.

[ynkedad]

Sorry for your troubles and I hope things work out for ya.

I for one need a Tylenol now.

[THOR]

Originally Posted by ynkedad

Sorry for your troubles and I hope things work out for ya.

I for one need a Tylenol now.

I agree.I got a headache reading your post. Ouch Ouch Ouch. I hope all turns out OK.

[Mark Dalton]

Not being very computer literate I have no idea what most of your post meant but it sounds bad. Hope things get better for you Rich.

[Mekanic]

You will be happy with the WD Drives, I'e used segate in the past, but 6 years ago I got my first WD, and will never use another brand again.

[Rich Z]

Well the restore function worked like a champ. I was actually VERY surprised, as it is very seldom that things go like they should with stuff like this.

If you don't have a backup plan for your PC, don't delay! Get an external hard drive with the software included to do automated backups to it. It just might save your butt some day. I've had these things for years now, and this is the FIRST time I actually had to do a restore from one. Would have been a real pain in the butt to have lost all those video clips I had done. I still have them on tape, but it would be a major chore to download them again. Plus all the source editing for the videos I have made up would have been lost as well.

Seriously, get one NOW. Set it up and then just forget about it until the day arrives that you will be glad you have it.

[dvdcta]

Originally Posted by Rich Z

Things have been hectic enough around here, and when I think I'm about to buckle under the load, I get another truck load of crap dumped on me.

Started when I saw this little notice on the screen of my PC saying something like "backup failed on drive F:..." No big deal, I figured, as the software probably glitched. So later I went to look at some files on that F: drive (it holds all my data, like photographs and videos and such), and the system couldn't find it. Hmmm.. Well reboot the system... During the power on sequence, I noticed the RAID utility flashing "ERROR" for that array. Uh oh.... This array is a pair of Seagate 1TB drives set up in RAID 0 to make a total volume of 1.8 terabytes. I quickly filled up that 500gb drive that came with the system, so I figured I had better give myself some elbow room. Putting two drives in RAID0 gives you the capacity of both combined, plus gives the drive a speed boost because it is sharing the write between two drives. So each drive only has to work half as hard as a single very large drive. Yeah, sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? The drawback is that if one of the two drives fails, everything on both drives is lost.

So, that is what happened to me, apparently.

Fortunately those Seagate drives were less than 30 days old, so I just yanked them out of my PC, took them back to Best Buy and exchanged them for a pair of Western Digital. Certainly not something I planned on having to do today, but tomorrow and the next several days were not going to be any better. Since my 30 days would be up next Monday, I just had to make time to do this.

So here I am waiting for a format of a 1.8 terabyte hard drive to complete so I can try out a restore function from this backup software I've been running. Never had to use it before, so this is going to be REAL interesting. The problem with backups of this nature is that you never really test them, because to do so would likely destroy your real data if that restore fails for some reason. So you only get to test it when you REALLY, REALLY need it to work. Of course, Murphy's Law is seldom very kind and understanding.

Not really how I had hoped today would go at all.........

pruuutter melt down??

[floridaZ]

I recently had the MBR on my second hard drive go bad. Which sucks for me, since it had about 70 gigs of videos that I can't really get back. Sad thing is that I was in Best Buy like a week before, and was looking at the 500gig external drives. I considered using it to back up my files, but decided that since I only had two 80gig drives that it would be a waste of money. Wrong!

Then, two days later, the same thing happened on my father's old Dell! The OS files were corrupted somehow. I pulled the drive, installed it in my computer, and pulled all the files off of it that my father said were important. Unfortunately, we neglected to pull off the tax records before I GW-SCAn'd it and put another OS on. So that data is gone forever. Cost my sister a substantial amount of money for college that she might of gotten through student aid programs since we couldn't supply the required tax records. Ouch.

But on a sunny note, before I wrote zeros to the drive, I found a bunch of photos that I thought I had deleted in my camera's software... which I also thought I had deleted. To make things short, I was able to recover alot of priceless pictures that I thought had been lost forever. That, and a few videos of me being completely retarded. I enjoyed recovering those as well.

My sister backs up her files on-line. Anybody know anything about this?

[Rich Z]

Originally Posted by floridaZ

My sister backs up her files on-line. Anybody know anything about this?

If you have access to a server online, you can really upload any files you want onto that server.