I have Hard Drive extensions going down on me like flies. What can be done?
 

Since I've been housebound one of the jobs I could do was back up all our content. It took me months to get them off the DVDs and onto the hard drives. Now I've found the 3rd one to go down. What the fuck is going wrong?

Unless they can be restored it's back to copying them off DVDs back on to knew drives.

I came to conclusion hard drives are the most unscure and the most expensive to backup data. Even if you've got RAID - there's no 100% guarantee you have your data secure.

We're using combined backup to store content - tapes when possible, BD + HDD otherwise.

I wonder if anyone tried to get content backup stored on free cloud like gmail or any other mail hosting?

Which model hard drives are you using?

3 Western Digital and 1 Fujitsu Siemans.

Plus it's all on DVDs.

I will refrain from posting a comment about flies going down on you.

Buy yourself a beer and cry in it. :winkwink:

In all seriousness, good luck buddy on finding a resolution.

I'm thinking I'm back to copying DVDs again. :(

Stick with the DVDs and stick them in a secure safe, external hdd's are generally not great, i've lost 2 in the past year aswell.

DVDs are not infallible either.

If your data is irreplaceable then store multiple copies, at least one copy offsite. Don't go making your 3 or 4 copies with exactly the same model/brand of DVD/HD either, since a manufacturing default or design issue could end up killing them all.

How much data are we talking about? Have you thought about building or buying a NAS with several TB of storage space? It won't negate the need for backups, but it will make the files more easily accessable, and the failure of a single drive won't take you down.

DVD's and CD's dont last forever. The data will not be readable forever.

Get a tape station (new or used)
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storag...try/index.html

Your data will be safe.

Relying on one type of media = mistake
Thinking DVDs are reliable = mistake

You need the 321 rule. 3 copies of everything, on 2 different mediums, and 1 off site.

I would recommend for you getting a drobo

http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...d=0CDsQ8wIwBA#

You can put 8 TB in that one I think. It is intelligent back up. If one of the 4 HDDs dies, it doesn't matter. You can hot swop it, put new one in and you're all good.

You also need an offsite back up. I use http://www.carbonite.com/ it works out to 15 cents a day.

I would agree that tape would be better than DVD for your other onsite storage.

So you have your PC with all the content on, backed up to the drobo, and you have DVD/Tape and then carbonite too.

That's what I do anyway.

HTH

Damian

I've thought about this, having a bunch of cds/dvds of pictures taken over the years. If i want to keep them for the rest of my life I wouldn't want to check them one day 15 years from now and find none of them work.

We have everything on DVDs

Most on the hosting servers.

Most on the office server.

And most on separate hard drives.

I was just pissed that now 4 separate hard drives have gone down.

Its a JBOD setup. He can hotswap it all he want, but the data on the disk is gone. There is no raid controller to rebuild it, and no disk to rebuild it from since its just a stripeset.

The data stability of disks, make them unusable for longterm backups. DISKS are not a backup media, unless you want to invest $5k+ in a no single points of failure entrylevel SAN

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/po...lt-lto3-060/pd
Dell make a cheap solution as well

OR go to Ebay and buy a used Super DLT Tape Drive, and 20 tapes for a few hundred dollars.

Paul, hard drives always crash. just a matter of time. the best luck I've had with them is to leave them running all the time, or fill it up and shut it off. mine have always crashed on start up. I'm pputting data on BD these days and hard drive. tape might be the way to go though

Not true.

"Drobo can combine up to 4 SATA I/II HDDs of any sizes together to form a single virtual disk, which sounds like JBOD. However, say, if you install 3 250GB HDDs, you'll be left with only about 500GB of total usable protected space instead of 750GB. Drobo supposedly uses block-stripping with distributed parity to provide the best level of protection and tolerance. When one of the disks fail, there's no loss of any data."

http://www.everythingusb.com/drobo_12314.html