a friend took his kids to the Mall to witness the Ingauguration. Their report on this historic occasion: "all we saw were butts and elbows."

goodCRIMETHINK

join the movement













books by me


...more books

my other writing

find me at...













my cool photos
07
Sep
07

Please backup your hard drive now… twice!

By baratunde
Categories: Personal and Technological Tags: , , .

There is a tightness in my chest, and I am crying right now. I have just suffered a catastrophic data loss for the second time in my life. Fool me once, shame on, shame on, fool me can’t get fooled again, or something like that.

In college, a freak transformer explosion and subsequent power surge killed my hard drive. From that point on, I swore to always back up my data, and mostly I did just that. As of mid this summer, I had a ridiculous mirrored RAID drive setup with external SATA drives and all sorts of doohickies. I had about 1 terabyte of data backed up locally and had started to upload it offsite to a service called Mozy. But then I started selling off my desktop in preparation for my move from Boston to NYC. I purchased a LaCie 1TB Big Disk and put all my media files and documents from my “Atlas” drive on it. That drive literally held my world on its shoulders.

I reasoned that after the move, I would re-establish my redundant data setup. I was not given the time. Two days after moving in, the drive started clicking. I knew that sound from my college crash, and raced to B&H Photo Video in Midtown. I purchased a Drobo storage device (a redundant storage array), hoping to save my Atlas drive. I was too late. I took the drive to Tekserve on 23rd St. It would cost $2,000, but can you put a price tag on your memories and thousands of hours of media production? They couldn’t recover it. They sent it on to DriveSavers who said it may cost up to $6,000.

I had recently closed out my Discover Card, but decided it was worth going back into nasty credit card debt. Then today, I got the phone call. “We have some bad news.”

They could recover nothing. They will just charge $400 for the attempt. It’s funny, I struggled with the decision to send them the drive considering the cost but it is so clear now that I would rather have paid $10,000 to get my data back. On the technical side, here is what happened. That LaCie big disk is actually two 500GB drives “striped” together in an array. One of those drives failed and because the data is stretched across both, you can get nothing even from the good drive.

Fortunately, I managed to get some of my data uploaded to Mozy as of late May 2007. So I’ve managed to recover all my digital photos as well as my “Documenz” folder which includes my books, jokes, financial filings, scripts and everything else a digital paper version of a file cabinet would have. Over the past year, I have been using Google Docs for most of my day to day creative documents with columns, joke ideas, etc, so that’s all good. Unfortunately, I have lost much, much, much more, so much that I cannot even be sure how much.

  • My iTunes music and video library. (~300GB) I estimate I had about $1500 worth of purchased music and videos in there plus hundreds of gigs of ripped CDs. The good news is I saved all the original CDs and can re-rip them. I had also “acquired” a massive music collection from a friend which ended up creating more problems than it solved. There was a lot of music I never really wanted to own permanently. I can repurchase the iTunes music at far less than the cost of the data recovery, though I’ll see about begging Apple for a restoration. I’ve head that happens sometimes.
  • My video projects (~500GB). This includes imported MiniDV footage and many edited and rendered Final Cut and iMovie projects made since January 2005. The good news is I have all the original MiniDVs and I can download the most valuable rendered projects back from YouTube (I hope) and blip.tv which hosts a bunch. The bad news is video is the most time intensive, high learning curve activity I have ever engaged in. Much of my knowledge in those project files has to be relearned.
  • My audio projects (??GB). This includes raw audio for my podcast, including dozens of unedited, unreleased interviews. I’ve often felt bad that I never got to many of these. Now I have a pretty good excuse.
  • My old computer files. About two months ago, I extracted data from my old college computer hard drives and put them on the Atlas drive. This had emails, papers, mp3s, etc. I was so excited to have found this time capsule, but now it’s gone.
  • My mother. At the end of it all, I am pained by the loss of the above items, but nothing can represent the sense of anguish I feel at having lost audio of my mother who passed away two years ago. We had taken a cross-country drive together, and I recorded hours of conversation. I only got to podcast a little bit of it (which can be redownloaded from my webhost) but the unedited stuff is beyond valuation. It’s like losing her all over again.

I certainly blame Lacie for the drive that failed, but my data is my responsibility. I will mourn this loss forever, and I really will never let it happen again. I’m trying to be open minded about this. It’s the most aggressive “spring cleaning” I’ve ever done. Even with my mother’s memories, I have thousands of photos and a bit of video. Mostly I have her in my heart, and if I think about it, I just happen to live in an era where it’s possible to capture image and sound in such high fidelity. Most of the people that ever lived had no such technology to remind them of their lost loved ones. The best memories are always going to be with me.

Now, here’s the plan

  • I have the Drobo with 1.3 terabytes of capacity to be the home of New_Atlas. This drive will also be mirrored on a 1TB external Glyph and online via Mozy or a similar service. Any recommendations?
  • My MacBook Pro internal drive will be mirrored on the Drobo/Glyph/Mozy setup as well
  • I’ll keep a smaller subset of high priority files for more frequent offsite backup

I urge everyone reading this to backup your most important files right now. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But right now. Do a local backup. Upload files to a server. Email them to yourselves. Print things out and put them in a lockbox.

If you’re interested in the Drobo, I have a discount code you can use for $25 off. It’s EVBARATUNDE, and yes I get some money out of it. Mostly, I want you to avoid what I’m going through.

Update: September 10, 2007 @ 11:13am

Wow, I never expected such a massive response to this, of all my posts. Most of yall found me through reddit, it seems. Thanks for dropping by and thanks for all the very useful suggestions. I wanted to provide a few more details of what went down and why I wrote this in the first place

  • The more technical side of the failure is that the “master” drive is fine but the “slave” drive suffered a series of head crashes. Basically, a major mechanical failure happened, and the platters inside the drive collapsed. It does not appear to be due to physical impact but just a mechanical malfunction
  • I appreciate just about all the comments except for those telling me I’m an idiot. I know that. This single-point-of-failure system was temporary during my move. The odds of the drive failing in such a short period of time are low, but it happened. Remind me to drop in on your house and mock you when you suffer your own tragedy
  • I wrote this post to 1) provide an emotional outlet for me 2) see how others might be handling their own data backups in this era of digital memories but mostly 3) to scare people into backing up their stuff as soon as possible in one way or another. I really don’t want this to happen to others. It costs too much in time and emotional energy.

If you’re interested in what I do when I’m not lamenting the loss of my digital existence, here are a few posts to give you a flavor for what I’m about. If you like what you see/hear/read, subscribe to the feeds or join the email list (both at the top of the blog page in the left and right columns)

Update: September 11, 2007 @ 8:50am

First up, welcome digg users who put me on the front page. I am so glad this story is making people back up their stuff. This is unbelievable. A few more updates

  • Apple’s iTunes folks restored almost all my purchased items, 83GB worth in over 900 tracks.
  • A 1TB Glyph drive has arrived which I will use to back up the drobo in a “spanning” setup. It’s two drives, but in this case the Glyph will fill up one drive then the other, sequentially. I’ll store this in a fire-proof box in my home. I’m also gonna store this all on Mozy, so that’s three places (two on-site and one remote) with ALL my data. I’ll make smaller backup sets of really important stuff
  • Today is my birthday, and getting Dugg is the best web gift ever… way better than a $1 Facebook “gift” :) And yes, it really is my birthday. Check the vid…




Update: September 11, 2007 @ 1:05pm
 Another update. I’ve been reading the comments further and want to point people to a few more resources

  • The Infrant ReadyNAS is a tool many have mentioned for hard drive backup. I studied it vs. the Drobo and chose Drobo, but that may not be right for everyone or even for me.
  • An eBook recommended by Macworld called Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, 2nd Edition. Here is a free article in two parts which goes through a lot of the same material. There is some great content here even if you don’t have a Mac

Technorati Tags: , ,

Viewing 207 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Jesus man. My chest is tight too now. And my eyes are watering. Thank goodness you still have memories to recall. I'm so sorry.
    • ^
    • v
    So sorry to hear about this man. I am a huge advocate of external hard drives. Not only for the obvious reasons, if you are heading out of town, you can stash the external hd to protect your photos (that's my main concern).

    A thief will rip off your computer, but never your photo albums. Food for thought.

    Same applies in the event of a fire, it's much easier to rip out the USB cord and carry it out of the door.

    So sorry about the loss of your mom's voice. That truly is tragic dude.

    Peace
    Dave
    • ^
    • v
    Thats super-harsh, dude. I've been following this story on twitter. I'm amazed they couldn't save anything. I recently set up a monster machine and set up RAID across the drives. This makes me really nervous about it now - that's why RAID5 is the way to go, I guess.

    There are scenarios where I could lose a lot of data - my most vulnerable is my laptop - I really should do something about that. The new box I mentioned above also needs something better. My linux servers, though, all share the load and back each other up. I've got 2 boxes in one location and another offsite and they all have a decent amount of storage. I do nightly rsyncs among all three boxes, so I feel pretty good about those.

    But the two Windows machines really make me nervous. As does the one external drive I used to use for video projects before I built the big desktop. Externals/poretables are just subjected to too much abuse to be trusted much.

    Thanks for the reminder to double-check my backup routines to make sure stuff is really doing what I expect.

    Now, you better never let that happen again!
    • ^
    • v
    Wow, B. I'm sorry to hear about your loss, and thank you for the reminder. I plan to back stuff up the very second I get home. I'll also keep those Mini DV tapes the way they are as a second backup.

    P.S. One reason I like eMusic over iTunes is that I can re-download everything I ever bought for free.
    • ^
    • v
    i've learned to accept that all data is fragile and temporary. electronic data most of all. still sucks royal booty crack (understatement) that you've lost so much, especially those recordings of your mom.

    for online backup, may i suggest amazon S3? you'll probably have to learn some programming magic, but it's pretty darn cheap. http://aws.amazon.com/
    • ^
    • v
    I'm really sorry to hear about your loss. I've had a couple of drive crashes in my days and they are always painful. The saving grace for me has always been that I've never quite been sure what is gone forever and what is buried in one of the giant backup archive files that I never bother to sift through. It hurts hearing about your audio and video that you know is gone.

    S3 does sound wonderful, but uplink speeds on modern broadband connections make it challenging for media, especially if you're editing.

    Best,
    Leo
    • ^
    • v
    Hey man,

    That really sucks. I don't mean to minimize your loss in any way, and I feel for you -- I've lost stuff, too (one of my Maxtor drives failed), but I thought I'd point out a few things:

    1. Drives fail. It sucks. But they do. Drives are rated with a mean time between failures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF). It's a MEAN time. Some drives will fail before that, some will last longer.

    2. I'd point the finger of blame at the manufacturer of the actual drive mechanism. LaCie doesn't manufacture the actual hard drives. If the housing or the firmware or the external interface failed, I'd blame LaCie. My LaCie 1TB NAS device has two 500mb drives and both are Seagate ST3500630AS. As far as I know, the only companies manufacturing the actual drives these days are Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital. This reminds me of the time when people were blaming Ford for the bad Goodyear tires. Ford doesn't make the tires. LaCie doesn't make the drive.

    Thanks for letting me know about Mozy. Seems like a good service.
    • ^
    • v
    oh my gosh, Baratunde - I meant to write to you to let you know how much I enjoyed hearing the podcast with your Mom. but, you are right, she lives in your heart, deeper than any electronics can go...I am so sorry, and hope that whatever fixes can happen, do. as painlessly as possible...
    • ^
    • v
    I'm so sorry to hear about the loss of data but the loss of the audio with your mother on it is even worse.

    I think you can get a 1 time redownload of your iTunes music. Thanks a lot for turning me on to Mozy and Drobo.
    • ^
    • v
    Sounds like you need to discover spinrite. http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

    Spinrite is a low very level disk utility, and has recovered litteral thousands if not 100's of thousands of hard disks. It's saved my skin a few times and is well worth buying. I'll let you research it yourself, if you want to here more about it, listen to a Security Now podcast from twit.tv. The co-host Steve Gibson is the author and found of grc.com and spinrite.

    Good Luck
    • ^
    • v
    Get a second opinion.

    Any reputable hard disk recovery set-up will offer a cost free assessment.

    Secondly, the striping does make it more difficult. However, it is by no means impossible to recover data from a striped drive. Hell, a competent engineer can pull back stuff even if they only have 1 part of the array.

    Personally, I've heard from people who have had drives recovered after water immersion, fire damage, dog attacks. Mechanical failure should be no issue for a reputable set up.
    • ^
    • v
    Mozy Unlimited is starting to look like a better deal every day...
    • ^
    • v
    stay away from lacie. they use the cheapest drives they can get and resell them at a huge premium. their service is abysmal. there's an inverse relationship between quality of support and quality of product, once again verified by lacie.
    • ^
    • v
    Sorry but why in the heck would you blame LaCie? Things break from time to time; cars, planes, microwaves, etc. I find it completely sad that from your last data lost you obviously didn't learn a lesson.

    So in hopes you learn your lesson here is what I do. First I have an NAS device with 1 TB, this allows me to make complete copies of my MAC/Windows machines. Then I also copy my regular data to these machines. On top of this I use Mozy and Amazon S3 both to upload my data. I have no single point of failure so that if any of the four places my data is contained breaks I will always have a copy.
    • ^
    • v
    Have you tried SpinRite? Magical program for hard drive recovery. Worth a shot.

    http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
    • ^
    • v
    Sorry to hear it, man, but thanks for reminding others that this can happen to anybody.
    • ^
    • v
    You would have happily paid $10,000 to have your data restored, yet if someone had asked you if you would pay merely a few hundred dollars to get a SECOND external drive as a backup, you would have declined.

    You sir, with all due respect are an idiot.
    • ^
    • v
    That really sucks. Especially that you thought you were covered in case of catastrophic data loss.

    I am really paranoid about the type of thing you said. I've heard too many stories of people's backups being bad and all-is-lost type of situation. With pretty much all of my life's memories being digital (I've gone digital a long time ago, storing all receipts, photos, CDs, etc digitally) if I were to suffer a data loss I agree - it would be devestating and $10k would be cheap to recover it.

    My backup plan is as follows:
    1. My main home PC hosts most of the active data. I have a normal HD - no RAID as that can sometimes make data recovery more impossible - not to mention if you do striping and not mirroring it doubles the chance of one hard drive taking out all of your data. If I had a lot of money I would probably do RAID mirroring of some sort.

    2. I have a linux server in-house that acts as a file server. I back up all music, documents, and anything else I can think of to this server hourly or nightly depending on the type of data. Backup is unencrypted.

    3. I have a portable hard drive I plug in once a month and back up most things to. This is then stored in a fire-proof safe in my residence. This backup is compressed and encrypted in case it is stolen.

    4. I rent a dedicated server to which I back up to. This backup is done daily and is encrypted; and is located fairly far away from me to give some separation for any sort of natural disasters.

    5. I backup my photos manually maybe twice a year onto DVD. This is in the off-chance that someone sets off an EMP which manages to wipe out all magnetic storage devices. I told you I am paranoid.

    6. I backup all other information such as USB Key Drive and Laptop data to my main PC which is then eventually moved to the other backups.

    The main software I use to do all of this is called SyncBack SE

    http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html

    I highly recommend to all - you have not only scheduled backups but also backups based on when you insert a certain drive or other criteria.
    • ^
    • v
    I had a similar problem (clicking drives, write/read errors after some time) with my LaCie drive, a 500GB version, 2*250 hard drives. It also stretched the data across both disks but NOT like a RAID0. Rather, it just had a chip that simulated one big partition. I was able to disassemble it, connect the two disks to my PC and restore pretty much everything using R-Tools NTFS and scanning the drives. I am not sure how the newer LaCie drives work, but my guess is they also don't handle the data like a RAID0. If your drives are actually mechanically broken, it is probably too late. But if you still have the drive and have not tried it yet, I would recommend you do ;)
    • ^
    • v
    I know the feeling, I am sitting in a hotel room right now waiting for "Kroll Ontrack" to open up so I can drop a drive off with them. If you do still want to try to recover it, I would check with them. They supposedly can recover raid drives.


    Ryan
    • ^
    • v
    So sorry to hear this. Losing hard drive data is the same thing as as having your memories wiped out of your brain. Thanks for the post I need to start backing up again soon!
    • ^
    • v
    As others have said, you should try spinrite on your drive. There is a good chance that spinrite can save your data. Go to http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm and give it a try.
    • ^
    • v
    Use CBL (cbltech.com). They've recovered drives from me damaged by almost everything you can imagine and they just managed to recover a few TB of data for a friend which was spread over a huge software RAID that was incorrectly configured and which the software manufacturer couldn't help with at all. The drives couldn't be seen by the software. CBL got every last bit back.

    Their slogan is "No data, no charge" and they've lived up to that for the 11 years that I've done business with them. I don't work for them and I don't get paid for referrals. Ever drive I or any acquaintance of mine has ever sent them was fully recovered but if they can't recover -- unlike the other scum out there who charge $200-2000 just to look at the problem -- there's no bill.
    • ^
    • v
    http://services.seagate.com/ seagate data recovery is much cheaper than what you listed. i have usedthem often, they have never been able to not repair a drive, and they do not charge if they can't recover any data. they are among the best in the business, and since seagate has bought them out, it might be worth hanging on to the drive and sending to them for a free assessment. no need to explain the situation or past attempts, if they can get the files they will send you a file list of your drive.
    • ^
    • v
    Damn, that sucks. This might not be feasible for all your files, but here's a tip: Spread them around. And I don't mean as in several backups - That's inherently risky since truly redundant backups are almost impossible to achieve (what happens if your house burns?). Instead, use BitTorrent (there's a fair chance any interesting content will be downloaded by lots of people), YouTube, Flickr, Gmail, etc..

    Personally, I'd also recommend a version control system for settings and small personal files - Not only can you have one copy on each machine you use (same settings everywhere X backups), but you won't lose stuff you've deleted from the sandboxes.
    • ^
    • v
    Losing data is a weird experience. It really feels like losing a large part of your life. When it happened to me, I felt ashamed to mourn the loss of ones and zeros. I actually retracted away from technology, I tried to get away from it completely. It was a rough time. When I eventually came back though, I came prepared.

    Unfortunately you can't know what data loss is until it happens to you... I think your article will help a lot of people really think about it though, and hopefully some of the lucky ones will take action.

    Here's my method:
    http://www.christophercamps.com/archives/how-to...

    good luck to you, and remember to keep it simple.
    • ^
    • v
    I know off-site file storage is all the rage if you've got the bandwidth to do it, but there is always the option of removable media. Writable media quality has gotten much better over the past decade. I have some TDK Archival dvds that are still readable when scratched and estimated to have a life span of 70 years.

    If all my hard drives were to fail simultaneously, i'd still have those discs.
    • ^
    • v
    "Secondly, the striping does make it more difficult. However, it is by no means impossible to recover data from a striped drive. Hell, a competent engineer can pull back stuff even if they only have 1 part of the array."

    The LaCie drive sounds like it was a RAID 0 of two 500 GB disks. In this sort of striping there is no redundancy and if one disk fails half the data is lost. Competence has nothing to do with it; an engineer can do nothing with only one part of the array.
    • ^
    • v
    I have had the same kind of experience, including losing some data that was more valuable than anything I can ever own again. And this happened on a medium I bought with the express purpose to backup data...

    Data loss does amount to losing a part of yourself, its impact is impossible to calculate.

    Since you were doing all the right things before I don't think it's fair to blame you. You would expect a hard drive to last -some- time, right? My mishap also happened using a LaCie drive, which has soured me on the brand. I realise it could have happened with any brand, but it happened to be with a LaCie drive.

    I'm using a backup on the second hard drive and I'm looking forward to using Time Machine for continuous backup on a separate medium once I get the new machine that will be my data repository, somewhere around January, if all goes right.

    To all of you who share the experience, I extend my sympathies.
    • ^
    • v
    I have the exact same drive! It just crashed last week. There must be some bad mojo for that drive. I am still under warranty, but fixing = formating....
    I am tempted to void the warranty and try to mount the drives myself. I heard no clicking, so I don't think it is a head crash or platter problem. I think the internal controller is kaput. double back-up, automated, (maybe the new osx time machine will help us all)
    • ^
    • v
    Someone mentioned Amazon S3. Sure there's an API so you can access their hosted file storage yourself . . . but check out JungleDisk (http://jungledisk.com/), which is a 3rd-party company whose software client handles all that for you. Very cheap. You can configure your storage bucket there as a (mounted) drive in Windows or OSX Linux or whatever. I've had good success putting stuff there.

    I use JD as well as an external 80GB for important documents.

    Still sorry to hear about your data loss, man.

    --Tim
    • ^
    • v
    By doing a RAID0, you actually increased your chances of a catastrophe. Now it would only take one of those drives to fail. You chose speed and space over redundancy and you paid for it. As you probably know now, you could have done a RAID1 and got the redundancy.

    You probably could have even setup your drives in a JBOD configuration to get the space and you would have only lost half your data. It probably would have been easier to recover the data off the bad drive too, if it wasn't RAID0.

    I have little sympathy for you. You preached all this backup and redundancy but setup your two 500GB drives striped instead of mirrored.

    Get back on your torrents and fill up your drives with movies and music again. It's not like you had a TB of Word and Excel docs. :)
    • ^
    • v
    A few things. If you are gonna run RAID, run RAID 1 or 5. NEVER RAID 0... NEVER... if you care about your data. Not even for a little while. RAID 0 should be used for SPEED ONLY! Like for your swap drive, or game data.

    I do not feel sorry for you...


    Also, don't buy LaCie. They usually don't have enough vents, plus you never know what OEM, last-run drive is in there (could be a maxtor even). You are much better off going straight to Seagate. Don't be swayed by the pretty case. I think you can use the big disk as RAID 1 anyway.

    So you are bitching and want us to feel sorry for you for putting a Striped RAID set in an easy-bake oven and losing all your data. Plus, you transferred from a mirrored RAID to this one... Did'nt you read the reviews? LaCie crap will screw up in days, sometimes hours.

    Either way, this taught you to never do RAID 0. Hell you can loose everything on RAID 5, if the drives overheat. Mirror only.
    • ^
    • v
    That's horrible. All my pictures from my high school years were wiped out due to hard drive failure. Around 15,000 digital pictures.
    • ^
    • v
    Cecil,

    You are needlessly cruel. I am NOT asking for anyone's sympathy. Did you read my entire post? I said I wrote it to vent, get advice from others and encourage other people to backup their systems.

    I'm glad you felt compelled to comment on my blog, but I don't care if you feel sorry for me, and there is no need to put words in my mouth. I never demanded sympathy.

    Also, I ran this LaCie as a temp measure for SIX WEEKS. I said in my post that I blame LaCie for the failure because that's a poor product. I also said I blame MYSELF for the data loss.

    I hope that should any sort of tragedy befall you, even an avoidable one, that you are not treated in the rude, cruel and bitter manner by a complete stranger as you have treated me.

    here is your comment:
    A few things. If you are gonna run RAID, run RAID 1 or 5. NEVER RAID 0… NEVER… if you care about your data. Not even for a little while. RAID 0 should be used for SPEED ONLY! Like for your swap drive, or game data.

    I do not feel sorry for you…

    Also, don't buy LaCie. They usually don't have enough vents, plus you never know what OEM, last-run drive is in there (could be a maxtor even). You are much better off going straight to Seagate. Don't be swayed by the pretty case. I think you can use the big disk as RAID 1 anyway.

    So you are bitching and want us to feel sorry for you for putting a Striped RAID set in an easy-bake oven and losing all your data. Plus, you transferred from a mirrored RAID to this one… Did'nt you read the reviews? LaCie crap will screw up in days, sometimes hours.

    Either way, this taught you to never do RAID 0. Hell you can loose everything on RAID 5, if the drives overheat. Mirror only.
    • ^
    • v
    Welcome to the internet...
    • ^
    • v
    I lost my hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and while I back most my important documents to my usb drive. I just burned a cd of pictures of my new son before the hd failed. I am very glad I did not get "lazy" that day and did not do it.
    That is the one thing about storing everything digitally, you need backups and backups of backups.
    • ^
    • v
    A timely reminder. What you said about your mother was particularly important, I think. My dad was in a similar position a month or two ago - his Thinkpag was showing signs of weirdness, and my Mum encouraged him to back the drive up. Thanks to my influence, they already had a back-up drive. The only way she persuaded him to back up was that he had gigabytes of photos and videos of his recently deceased mother (my grandmother) on there. Eventually he agreed and backed it all up.

    The drive died within 14 days. He's very glad he did so.

    I'm off to back up my system for the first time in about four months right now. Hope all goes well for you and whatever data you may or may not be able to restore.
    • ^
    • v
    I had a similar data-loss issue; what a disaster. After mine, I researched around and came across the Infrant ReadyNAS. It's a really small and quiet NAS device that will let you do RAID5 (or, Raid-X as they've branded it). In their Raid-X/5 implementation, you can hot-swap the disks, grow the partitions by adding more disks, etc. It's all very easy to manage and set up. Probably took about 10 minutes from unboxing to start using.

    Their tech support is great too.. I've had a couple of issues, and got personal responses both times..

    Hope it helps....
    • ^
    • v
    Hey man. sorry about your loss and thanks for this wakeup call. I just got around to scheduling a back up of my important files every sunday.
    • ^
    • v
    FYI for all the people who have naively recommended SpinRite: that program can do absolutely nothing for a drive that has suffered *catastrophic mechanical failure* as this one has. Recommending SpinRite in this case is like recommending a can of Fix-A-Flat to repair a tire that has been shredded from driving over a row of parking lot tire spikes. Ain't gonna work.

    The only hope of recovery from severe mechanical failure like this is a low-level recovery of the data, perhaps even at the magnetic flux level.

    And I would add my recommendation for trying an outfit with lots of experience, like OnTrack Data Recovery. I've used them in the past, and while expensive (a relative term), their expertise at dealing with toasted drives is unparalleled.

    Don't give up on it. Even if there isn't a way to recover the data right now, recovery technology makes strides like every other technology. Keep the bad drive for the day when it can be recovered. Good luck.
    • ^
    • v
    One other comment regarding backups: I've learned the hard way to keep backup technology simple. That is, don't rely on proprietary backup programs with special encryption/compression routines -- if such programs get abandoned over time, your data is unretrievable. Back up using straightforward file copy routines.

    Hardware-wise, simple and reliable beats massive and complex. That is, I'd rather use several conventional 300GB drives to hold my data rather than a single large striped RAID unit. It's not elegant, it's not cutting-edge, but damn, it works when you need it.

    Finally, for your _real, real_ valuable data -- the stuff you absolutely don't want to ever lose -- make a third-level back up onto some removable storage (DVD maybe, or miniDV data tapes). True, there isn't a removable storage media that is 100% stable, but again, this is a third-level backup "just in case". Hopefully, you'll never need it again.
    • ^
    • v
    Sorry to hear about the loss. I had 2 years worth of pics of my brand new baby and my thesis for my masters which was not yet completed. I lost it all in a piece of crap netgear nas. Big mistake and I should have known better as well. I pray that if you get anything back, its the audio of your mom. I can only imagine....You should see that guys post above about seagate as I can only imagine it would be worth every penny to have back. Hope you get it...
    • ^
    • v
    Have you tried connecting one drive to your system, then using spinrite on it?
    http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
    • ^
    • v
    Hey,
    It sucks, but you can still recover your data - if you have another computer try accessing your hard drive with that - use Linux because it can detect things that OSx and Xp will ignore (they just assume it's gone for good).

    Also if you have the money, you can send it away for repair or for extraction. There are some services (the best ones being about $1000 or under) that can get everything off your hard drive - they reverse engineer your hd and get the information. Nothing is lost except for some system and boot files - it's what the fbi and police use to get crucial data or evidence off of a suspects computer if it had failed or died or sabotaged. They have a lot of services that are meant for the public, I'm trying to think of the name of the most reputable one but the name escapes me.

    Try out one of these services, maybe put up a donation box and people can donate a $1 or something to help with the cost of that. Good Luck
    • ^
    • v
    Looks like another of thouse Drobo promos to me.
    Get a simple hard drive and a USB adaptor for it and copy your data to it regurarely. That should do it.
    • ^
    • v
    Hmm... well I take back my commen on the drobo promo. After all it you provide enough alternatives also in your comments.
    • ^
    • v
    hey truly sorry and about the audio really does suck... truly.. A tear rolled as I read this..

    hang in there
    • ^
    • v
    sorry to hear about your loss.. i used to work for apple and we used the lacie big disc. the onboard raid controller is prone to failure.

    we weren't happy and neither were the customers who lost their data.
    • ^
    • v
    I am just going to repeat the others who suggested spinrite to try to emphasize its importance. It has saved many hard drives from problems in the past.

    Plus, after you recover your data (or the slim slim chance of failure), running spinrite on good drives periodically will help prevent crashes, or tell you when the drive is about to go bad way before there is an actual problem.
    • ^
    • v
    Been there, done that. I called it: HDD Failure of '06

    http://journal.krhis.net/index.php/2006/12/18/h...

    Right now I have a 320GB USB external hard drive which I have rsync scheduled to synchronize to every 8 hours. My only concern right now is if my house gets hit by lightning or (as you stated above) a freak incident of some type occurs. Worst case scenario something like that would destroy every piece of electronic equipment in my house.

    Off-site backups are not ideal for me right now, but I am tempted to purchase another external hard drive and keep it in my safe.
    • ^
    • v
    I feel for you man that sort of data lose is a bitch!
    • ^
    • v
    Ouch man. Ouch. BIG ouch. I'm sorry for your loss, but thank you for motivating me to stick to my recent redundancy and backup commitments.
    • ^
    • v
    I know people have said not to blame Lacie and I know one shouldn't go on anecdotal evidence, but the only three Lacie external hard drives (BigDisks) I had come across before reading this all died whereas I've seen very few from any other manufacturer (Seagate, Maxtor) give up (despite having seen many more of these). I suppose it could be related to the fact that RAID 0 doubles their chance of failure, but that's no consolation if you've lost data.

    Anyway, absolute proof this is not, but I'll continue my policy to avoid Lacie external drives. From my (obviously subjective) viewpoint. They suck.

    Frankly.
    • ^
    • v
    Huh? Collapsed platters? That doesn't make any sense. If you've ever taken apart a drive, you'd see that the platters are ~1/8" thick aluminum disks on a sturdy spindle with thick spacers.
    • ^
    • v
    This is an unfortunate tale. When you lose data we all just think how can I stop it from happening again, and please I just want those files back!

    It is great you have written this article.

    If you are looking for some open-source backup software, consider LBackup . Please keep in mind LBackup is aimed at system administrators.

    If you would like some help with your backups feel free to get in touch with one of our representatives.

    Please accept our condolences for your loss.

    All the best preserving your data,
    The Lucid Team.


    --
    Lucid Information Systems
    http://www.lucidsystems.org
    • ^
    • v
    I know that feeling.
    2 weeks ago my harddrive pretty much blew up and I'm currently hunting for a replacement PCB in a desparate attempt to retrieve some data.
    I've lost 5 years worth of holiday/Wedding photos/videos, 10 years worth of work, all my music and all my personal documents/emails.

    A week before that, my camera's CF card got corrupted and I was so relieved that I had backed it up so I ordered some DVDs to write them to. The DVD's arrived the day after the harddisk blew. Next time I'll pay more for a faster delivery. :(
    • ^
    • v
    Try spinrite, seriously, it really works and it's worth a shot right? www.spinrite.com
    • ^
    • v
    The Lacie Big range has long been the bane of my existance, myself and many others I know have had total failures with them, very unreliable. Sorry for your loss. Proper RAID-5 rigs in physically seperated buildings is my choice, not cheap but for the extra piece of mind that my ever expanding digital life is safe it is actually a small cost.
    • ^
    • v
    RAID != backup
    RAID != backup
    RAID != backup

    Do not fool yourself into believing that having RAID means you have a backup.
    • ^
    • v
    Just thought I would add how sorry I am to hear about your data loss - particularly of your family memories, that truly is tragic. I've been trying to arrange an external HD backup solution for a while now, investigating options and the like, as I'm having DVD writer issues. Now I'm sure gonna put my foot on the gas... Thanks
    • ^
    • v
    Yeah, just hit up the Piratebay and re-download all the movies and audio... of...your mother.... that... nobody but you had.

    Oh wait, that guy was a total idiot.

    My sympathies to you man, hard lesson learned, but you have got to LOVE hearing from these arrogant jackass' claiming they have avoided every possible technical problem known to man because of tehr aw3som3 stAr Tr3k l33t SkLlLz!

    LOLOCAUST!!!1111
    • ^
    • v
    Sorry to hear your lost, esp with regards to losing your MUMS audio forever. That would be unbearable. I recently loss all my photos from a hard disk, it was a 750GB Seagate which was BRAND NEW. At the end of the day, the NUMBER ONE rule is: Always have a backup thats MAINTAINED, then duplicate that backup.
    • ^
    • v
    sorry to hear about that, i lost a lot of hard work when a 20gb laptop drive failed a month back and i thought that was bad, but it seems small compared to your loss. my feelings towards storing valuable data changed after that incident. now i try to delete as much as possible on my remaining drives, so that if this kind of thing ever happens again, i don't regret it so much afterwards. we put far too much value into these things, it's just not worth taking the risk any more. live life and don't hold on to the past wherever possible.
    • ^
    • v
    You might want to try sticking the drive in the freezer next time, the clicking is often cause by warping and putting a drive in the freezer can help. Keep it in a plastic bag though.

    The clicking is normally a mechanical failure, technically it should be possible to remove the platters and put them in another drive of the same type.

    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░▐▌░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░▐▌░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░████░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██▒▒▒░░░░░░░░██░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒██▒▒▒████▒▒▒▒▒████▒▒▒██▒░░░░░░░░██░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░██░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒████████░░░
    ░░░░░░██▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒██████████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░██░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░██░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░██░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░██░░░░██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░██████░░░░██████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
    • ^
    • v
    i also bought a LaCie 1TB big disk extreme (contains 2x3.5inch 500gb drives) and my firewire died after about 2 weeks - the usb 2 functionality only worked if (as the LaCie support explained) if i plugged in and charged up the drive before connecting to computer - it didn't work at all on my mac with firewird and usb 1, and it worked intermittently on my pc (using macdrive) - eventually after about 6 months of annoying LaCie support they agreed to fix it for me but i live in dublin and the fixit shop was in london and it would have cost me 60 euros to send it to them!

    i always thought LaCie were supposed to be good but clearly this particular product is crap.

    sorry for your troubles.
    it's expensive and time consuming to double or triple backup.
    pity drives won't just work for the amount of time they say on the tin.
    • ^
    • v
    Did you try freezing the drive? Believe it or not, it will often work.

    http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze...
    • ^
    • v
    Sorry to hear about your loss. I found out that the only data i've never lost is the one is on paper, or in some other analog format (compact casette). All my important photos are printed, all the passwords and important phone numbers are in a (paper)notebook. There is a lot of cds i had to throw out because somehow they were started to being unreadable after about five years, yet i have perfectly working audio cassettes with my childhood memories (~25 years old). So my backup plan is "go analog for the most, most important stuff", the rest... external hdd, plug in once in a week, do an incremental backup, put away.
    • ^
    • v
    Maybe some of your data is still in your old desktop hard drives.
    • ^
    • v
    try finding out if the company just tried to only pull the data off. some companies actually take apart the disk platters and pull data off of them onto clean drives. its not cheap, but doable. don't loose hope!
    • ^
    • v
    I really feel for you! I've always backed up important data to CD's and latterly DVD's, however as file sizes increase, and the number of them increase it became too inconvenient. Earlier this year my machine crashed and I had no backups. Luckily I was able to recover most of the data and only lost a few gig of video and music.

    Since then I made the effort to build a simple Linux server housing six drives I had around the place. I was just backing things up to one drive on the server every few days or so but your story has really struck a cord.

    I now backup the backup to a second drive on the server, and important stuff goes offsite. I use gmail for my email and now back that up using Thunderbird. I'm also going to take up another commenter's suggestion (Dave) of backing up digital photos to DVD every few months.

    So thank you, I've learnt from your mistake and you may have saved me the same hardships in the future.
    • ^
    • v
    Murphy has some laws for you. Anyway, I stay away from the enclosures that come bundled with oem backup solutions, as they never work as supposed. I have scheduled an incremental backup to a 500Gb drive and also to an ftp location (at my host) using Backup4all - www.backup4all.com
    Though until now I had no problems with my hard drive, I had to restore documents that I mistakenly saved with the wrong changes - this is where saving multiple versions of the same document helps.
    • ^
    • v
    The same thing happened to me.. THRICE.
    It was painful, all that work put into the photos, videos etc.
    But one thing for sure, the crashing made my life easier.
    I didnt have to organize all those rubbish I had.. It was soo much easier to let go off things that i kept just for keepsake...I didnt have to look at something twice and think about whether I should have thrashed it.. It was abit of a relief that I lost all that...but i tried to reenact what Ive lost and tried to keep it in my long term memory of whatever pictures or data I remembered, and either redownloaded them, or put them alll in my mental memory.
    • ^
    • v
    agree with your pain, had this happen to me too many times to be kind in the past.

    now all backed up to strongspace via a nifty rsync command.

    rsync -azvCL --exclude=.DS_Store --progress ~/docs/ joe@joe.strongspace.com:/home/joe/docs/

    wish i'd done the same to my fiancee's laptop before that went postal, damn thing near blew up.
    • ^
    • v
    One more thing, the work I did for high school and university that I like to keep, I guess I was sad things were alll gone, but, I have probably learnt to let go, and tell myself "whatever, it's all gone, Ive got my grades for it"

    Just yesterday, I lost my USB thumbdrive, it has all my recent work I did for programming and Computer graphics. I haven't even submitted them. And I don't have any backup. I tell myself, "If I can do all that work the first time round, I definitely can do it again, and perhaps in a different way"
    • ^
    • v
    Well out of 15 external hard drives, i've lost 7 in as many years i.e. about one per year on average, due to many different factors but i'd say it all boils down to ATA internal drives are NOT meant to travel nor be bumped while working. That's why laptop drives were created, with at least some sort of robustness intended.

    What i've learned is... ONLY USE EXTERNAL DRIVES FOR BACKUP PURPOSES!!!!!!1111!!11 Have you ever noticed how external drives, even while composed of just REGULAR hard drives in a cheap enclosure, only sport a 1-2 year warranty, as compared to the drives themselves which carry a 3-5 year warranty? Strange? Not really. The manufacturers KNOW they aren't going to last very long!

    I have a copy of my data on my PC (and/or online @ Streamload (now MediaMax) which btw used to be a wonderful service with unlimited storage space but has since been reduced to a comical excuse for a data storage provider, trying to proclaim their commitment to sharing MP3s and Videos around the world, which i'm guessing is just a gimmick to try and win new customers - i've got about 500GB of data stored there, which should be about 5TB but their "new and improved" backup tool hasn't been updated in 2 years and rarely works with files > 100MB i.e. pretty much everything on my hard drives). Anyways i've got 12TB of data and though on my current budget of 1 new hard drive per month, it's impossible to back everything up, but i do what i can. One day i'll build another box with a 2nd phat RAID-5 and copy sync everything over there... until that happens, i've got single 500GB drives (cheap as dirt) which i manually (eww) plug-in, and do my backups of critical data to.
    • ^
    • v
    I know how you feel about those audio recordings. I received a few audio tapes of lectures my father had made and I turned them into digital recordings. I have backups of them everywhere to ensure I won't lose it.

    I use a backup system of two separate Western Digital MyBook Firewire drives and Chronosync for the mac to back up my data. This system does a great job of building an archive of older files and, between the two of them, can hold 500 gigs redundantly. The drives aren't connected to eachother so I don't have to worry about losing much. I also have a separate USB portable disk to store my 40gb of local important data which goes to a safety deposit box.

    There is a philosophy I hold called the "spheres of backups" which lets me decide which of my data is core data I can never lose and which is data I don't mind losing. If I lost all my music and movies, I can always get that back. My own writing, my father's writings, my father's audio recordings, my own digital photos; those I can never recover. They're also a lot smaller in size so its easier to back up.

    I feel for you. Those Lacie striped drives are real trouble.
    • ^
    • v
    Hey there, sorry to hear about your loss.

    I would recommend contacting Apple -- they can allow you to re-download all of purchases, but they only let you do this once on your account.

    Give it a shot.

    http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/


    Richard
    • ^
    • v
    Also; I'm really impressed at how much junk 'Cecil' managed to come out with there. Days, sometimes hours? What reviews have you been reading?

    There's nothing wrong with Raid 0 at all, provided you have a fallback data point, which he did.

    You really are picking at hairs, and on a fly without wings too.

    Richard
    • ^
    • v
    Drivesavers doesn't cost that much (you said $6,000 is what they quoted you). It cost me about $2,000. You can read about my data recovery experience and also get a 10% discount from Drivesavers. Seriously, it shouldn't cost you more than $2,000 max through Drivesavers. If you change your mind, give them this code: DS16990 and they'll give you 10% off. Good luck!
    • ^
    • v
    Get in touch with a college with an advanced IT program, and see if they have any students who would have an interest in attempting an abnormal data recovery. It's not impossible, just really difficult.

    Of course, if two recovery agencies failed to retrieve any data, then it's quite likely that at least one head started scraping it's the platter. Some of the data is going to be unrecoverable, but with any luck you'll get back the data that you value the most.

    Also, Ontrack DOES have the reputation of being the best in their field. If you can afford it, give them a try.
    • ^
    • v
    thanks for sharing baratunde, a valuable lesson there for us all. hopefully one day you will be able to recover the data as cipheroid suggests.

    i don't like to spread negativity but in this case i feel i must point out to cecil that you sir are a colossal loser.

    best of luck baratunde
    • ^
    • v
    Well, I dont have so much data as you do and im a bad backuper. Some stuff is on my mac, some stuff is on my PC. But at this moment I promise - when I ll get my paycheck, I WILL buy a new external HDD for my backups.

    But still, i have suffered from this before bout 1.5 years ago. 2 Years of digital pics dissapeared, that is 2004 and half of 2005. Thank god I recovered the rest of em.
    • ^
    • v
    That is a touch deal. It's been the way of things as far back as I can remember. System 360s; VAXs; PCs running DOS; the old Apples... Hard drives fail, eventually.

    I've got several external USB drives for backup. I've used spinrite for twenty years now. It's brilliant software. Spinrite at Level 5 restored four unusable drives over that time period, and I saved my Dad's pc TWICE with spinrite- readable long enough to mirror the drive and replace it with the new one.

    I use Acronis drive software and Karen's Replicator for batch and on-off backups.
    • ^
    • v
    Bummer to hear :-\

    It took me about a month, but I finally all my data on Mozy as well (115GB). That is really just a backup of my 2 external 250GB firewire HD's in RAID-1.

    But just like you I think I'll be grabbing a Drobo soon, the thing just looks so awesome. I just wish they have a 1Gbit Ethernet version.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm real sorry to hear about losing the audio files of your Mom. That's really unfortunate.

    I've used portable hard drives and dual layer DVD for backup. Given the amount of data you need to save, I would go with a hard drive strategy. Hitachi has a new 1 TB drive on the market. I would buy a couple of those and external drive kits. Just swap using those drives in a two week cycle ( Use Drive A in Week 1, Use Drive B in Week 2...).

    A simple strategy like this is more workable because it provides a reasonable level of protection, is relatively cheap and is simple enough process that you will continue to use it over the long term. You also never lose more than a week's worth of data as it's highly unlikely you lose two drives in different systems at the same time.

    ( Remember to hide the drives from a simple search in case you get burglarized )

    Good luck.
    • ^
    • v
    The Amazon S3 backups with Ruby are the way to go, man.

    Granted, it's going to take you forever to upload....but in the event of a failure, you could sure suck it down really fast!
    • ^
    • v
    Hey, what's your mozy user name. I just signed up and will put you as a referrer.
    • ^