Here’s a hint: disk platters aren’t supposed to have visible scrape rings or gouges on them. That’s bad.
The good news is, this dead disk drive was only a slight annoyance.
I harp about backing up. I know too many computer users and photographers who’ve had that “oh, crap” moment when the disk fails and they’ve neglected their backups. It’s happened to me — I once lost a major design document with ten days of work on a project when a laptop disk crashed three days before deadline. I’d been backing up the project, of course, by copying it to the same disk. Yay me. (for the record, I rewrote the doc and was only two days late. and exhausted and stressed to hell, and convinced that would never happen again).
So, a week ago, Laurie came in to tell me her mini was hung and when it rebooted the external drive wouldn’t mount. We poked at it a bit, and when we power cycled the drive, it started clicking.
That’s never good.
The good news is that her backups were current and living on the NAS. The better news is that I’ve been converting all of our external data disks to mirrored RAID drives, where the data is copied to two identical drives in the housing. This crashed drive was mirrored, and the status lights on it showed one drive was green.
It took about 30 minutes to tear apart the drive, extract the drives and plug the good one into a disk dock
A couple of days later the drives arrived, I stuck them into the raid housing and fired it up, formatted the drive, and then went and grabbed the drive and dock off laurie’s computer and attached it to mine. Using Superduper I cloned the old drive over to the new ones, plugged the mirrored raid into Laurie’s computer, and stuck the old, now retired drive into storage.
Because she’d used enough data (and isn’t yet fully committed to storing her files on the NAS….) this gave me a chance to upgrade her drive from 2TB to 3TB. The biggest hassle I had was convincing Time Machine to back up the new drive; even though it’s the same data and the drive is the same name, it sees the content as new because it’s all been rewritten at a low level, so it wants to back it up completely. I had to increase the quota for the backup acct on the NAS, and it’s now copying about 1.4Tb over the wireless to the NAS. Once that’s done, life will be easy again (I could speed it up by plugging laurie’s office into the gigabit, but since this is all background processing, ‘faster’ isn’t a big issue).
I have now ritually disassembled the old, dead drive, as you can see above. That both prevents someone (like me) from accidentally trying to use it again, and by the time I’m done with the platters, it’ll prevent snoopers from scoring any data off of them without a massive amount of work. (I never allow used drives out of my possession. dead ones get torn apart, retired ones get stored, and eventually torn apart after a few years; drives are a cheap investment so keeping control of my data is more important than a few bucks)
Data lost: none. Time lost to laurie: about 9 hours, most of that to cloning to the new drive. Time I spent on this? maybe 4 hours, since most of the work was done by the computers, not me.
Hard drives crash. That’s why you need backups. To me, one of the best backups is one you never need, and that’s why I do things like use mirrored RAID on drives, since if a drive crashes, the data’s still there ready to use without even losing time to a restore. That said, mirrored RAID is NOT a backup, because if the housing fails, it can destroy the data on both drives just as easily as it can write your info to both drives — so it’s more suspenders to backup’s belt.
Same with the NAS: it has redundancy in the drive array, but a failure within the NAS could scribble the drives, which is why I back up to the NAS, and then back up the NAS itself (and keep a copy of those backups offsite).
So consider this my latest lecture on why you need to back up your data, and do it well, and with a plan. Because as you can see above, disk crashes happen. But they don’t need to be painful. this wasn’t…
How are your backups doing?
(for the record, the drive above was a 2TB seagate green, in service just over two years. And replaced with Seagate 3TB green drives, because I’ve found them reliable and easily available at a good price).
The post Why backups matter — this is how it’s supposed to work appeared first on Chuq Von Rospach.