One of my Samsung Spinpoint hard drives has started to fail big time. Two of the four NTFS partitions on it suddenly became unrecognizable to Windows and Explorer came grinding to a halt.
One of these ‘bad’ partitons held my Vista installation. Booting into Vista is now not possible and trying to run a disk check in XP fixes numerous issues before failing with an ‘unknown error.’
Amongst other uses I use this disk for backups of the data on my main drive. Now that my backup drive is no longer working I’m starting to panic about all my photos and other data.
The irony is that the failing drive is the newer of the two Spinpoint drives in my PC. It goes to show that backups are essential no matter how new your drive is – take action!
I’m now wondering whether to replace the drive with a similar one or go with an external drive for backups. Do you think external RAID setup is overkill? I could go for an internal RAID 1 setup but then I’d need to buy two new drives as I need more space than my main drive currently provides.
I always worried about backups cos not only are you at the mercy of disks, but what do you do if something worse happens and you lose both tour PC and the backup?
I ended up using Mozy, the first upload was a real pain, but now I don’t even notice it doing its thing.
Saying that I still have a spare hard drive in a caddy for backing up some data or if needed moving to other places.
Hello,
I am currently in internship at the French embassy in Tokyo. I am doing a summary on how the Japaneses are using their cell-phones. I would like to use the photo you published here : http://www.notestomyself.net/2007/02/one-segment/
It would really be a good way for me to show the One Segment tool.
May I use it ?
Yours faithfully.
Mickaël Avoledo
How about trying out a cloud computing solution? It sounds quite brilliant to me, only if your data isn’t sensitive.
Yes, I often wonder about the horror of someone running off with my entire PC. ‘Off-site’ backups would be a better solution though more of a hassle to do regularly. Perhaps just a USB drive which I would hookup once a week? But what if my house burnt down? Yes, off-site backups! Maybe once I get a Blu-Ray burner this will become easier but even dual layer DVDs are impracticable now.
Does your Mozy tool sync automatically in the background? It would take me forever to upload all my data.
Cloud computing? My data is personal including thousands of photos so I’m not sure about that.
Mickaël, I don’t have an issue with that. I appreciate you asking first.
Yep Mozy runs in the background, you can also set schedules, its quite flexible. If you miss a schedules time, it will try and spot a period of in activity and then use that to upload things in.
It took me 2 weeks at full speed uploading. Its now got 86gb uploaded / backed up. It works incrementally as well, so it can spot changes rather than uploading entire files, useful if you use Outlook.
2 weeks! Wow. It is a good idea and the upload software sounds intelligent. Does it leave log/trace files around your hard disk in order to detect file changes like SyncToy?
I’m guessing you looked into privacy/security etc. as well? Or did you say you kept files password protected to add extra security?
I’ve got over 150GB of files that I’d like decent backups of and I’d like more of a quick weekly offline backup so I may just replace my hard drive or get an external e-sata drive.
I thought it was leaving sync files all over the place, but once the backups were complete it deleted them. It won’t backup one folder at a time, it tries to do a little bit of everything all at once and while its doing that, it creates sync files in all of those folders. Once finished it does delete them.
As for security, it uses 128bit encryption for uploading all the data to EMC / Mozy and once up, they store it all in a personal DB using 2048bit encryption.
Its a painful first upload, but you only have to do it once.
And like I said, I still keep a trusty external hard disk for doing quick dirty backups or for transfering stuff from PC to PC, etc.