You might lose all your data in 2016

[Shock]

This year I had 2 HDDs fail, both of which were not properly backed up. You would think I learned my lesson after the first failure but it wasn't a bad one, the second failure took out a years work with it. I was lucky and managed to get most of my important data back but it was a really big job.

I also had another unrelated data corruption problem, so just a reminder to keep multiple backups of important data separately and secured or off premises if you need to.

The CDs and DVDs you burned years ago are also starting to fail as well.

[MarkF]

Yes.  CDs and DVDs have a shelf life.  I seem to remember it's around 10 years.
I stopped using them for backups.  Instead, I use an old computer with a large drive as my main backup and backup all my data to it.  The computer for backup is ONLY used for backups and is NOT turned on other than to do a backup.  In addition, I use a USB drive as a secondary backup.

The risk of 3 hard drives failing all at the same time is slim and easier than a bunch of CDs or DVDs.

[Thorondor]

I try to follow the rule of three: three copies of important stuff, two different kinds of media, at least one copy stored offsite.

I wish LTO drives were more affordable. As it is relatively unreliable hard drives are the only option a home user has for backing up terabytes of data on a regular basis.

[daqq]

In addition to a locally stored copy (on a USB key used only for backup) I also have a zipped and encrypted archive that is on google drive. Works for me so far, I've got about 10GB of critical data.

[KJDS]

[Shock]

Tape is pretty horrible as a medium, too many things to go wrong. At least with disk in most cases the media has to fully break down or have a bad head crash for it to be forever lost and otherwise it's cheap and fairly fast.

[moya034]

Setup a file server with 3 HDD's and RAID 5. Setup a backup server with another 3 HDD's and RAID 5 which replicates any changes made on the file server on a daily basis. If you are concerned about your house burning down, then setup a VPN to your buddy's house and put a file server there

[Thorondor]

I just keep a stack of hard drives and some BD-RE disks under my desk at work. It's a lot faster to rotate hard drives than to use my pitiful DSL connection for any sort of backup.

[nctnico]

I just keep a stack of hard drives and some BD-RE disks under my desk at work. It's a lot faster to rotate hard drives than to use my pitiful DSL connection for any sort of backup.

Rsync does quite a good job on keeping files in sync over a low bandwidth connection. Only the initial upload takes long.

[MrSlack]

My backups:

* laptop itself, encrypted disk.
* rsynced to my desktop PC, encrypted disk.
* synced with Google drive (apps, not the free one which has a different SLA)
* manually mirrored encrypted USB stick that lives on my keyring (corsair survivor)
* archived monthly to USB hard disk in fire safe at home.
* archived every quarter to Amazon s3 with duplicity.

And I'm still paranoid I'll lose everything.

This paranoia got triggered after losing an entire raid array and finding the DVD backup was corrupt. Lost 500mb of important photos.

[Augustus]

What about M-Discs? Every now and then I see them mentioned somewhere but I don't know of a single person who has ever used one. Are they really as reliable as advertised? Or just another snake-oil type of product? 

http://www.mdisc.com/

[suicidaleggroll]

You might lose all your data in 2016

I doubt it

I have all centralized data/media (movies, music, pictures, etc.) stored on a 4-disk RAID 5 on my home server, which is then mirrored daily onto a backup system in the basement, and also mirrored daily onto an encrypted drive stored off-site.  All computers (laptops, etc.) back up their entire filesystem to the backup system in the basement nightly, using incremental backups (rsync --link-dest), which are also mirrored to a second drive on the same system, and the most recent of each of those backups is also mirrored daily on the encrypted drive off-site.

[PE1RKI]

if you actively use seagate barracuda hd's, start backup now and thank me later.

[moya034]

Speaking of losing data, has anybody had an SSD crash on them?

[John Coloccia]

I have a Synology RAID with 2x3TB drives, mirrored, for daily backup. I also have hard drives that I periodically do full backups to. It interfaces with a little SATA dock. So total, things are generally stored on 5 different drives. 6, actually, because most of my important files are in source control, and I typically download the lastest to my laptop as well.

[Shock]

if you actively use seagate barracuda hd's, start backup now and thank me later.

I wouldn't believe everything you read, but they did have bad firmware issues a few years back which was addressed and fixed. Seagate has been on the trailing end of a fanboy war for years. It all started when Western Digital started marketing their Raptor drives, gamers were all over that. Many years before that probably about 15 years ago I recall a Western Digital scare, then before that a Quantum scare. Heard rumors about Samsung HDDs a while back as well.

If you are referring to the Backblaze stats, the fact that they got people to mail in external disks and "shuck" them is proof in itself they are morons, without bringing up the rest of their shenanigans. There is a big problem with hardware bias that has been going on since the dawn of time, without doing a proper analysis and post mortem their results are meaningless.

You only got to listen to people "I'll never buy another (brand) again" based on a failure. Of course they forget about this when the next brand fails, by the third failure they are buying a tablet or a new TV per year and have been successfully brainwashed.

[hammy]

Speaking of losing data, has anybody had an SSD crash on them?

Yes, a corrupted and defective block in my Transcend SSD. At first I thought it is a filesystem error and I started fsck to fix it, the I realized the kernel wrote something about I/O error into the log ...

At the end I managed it to replace the defective block with a spare one, but the file was defective. I had to replace the file from the backup.

Cheers
hammy

[suicidaleggroll]

Speaking of losing data, has anybody had an SSD crash on them?

I have about 50 SSDs under my control running 24/7.  The oldest one dates back about 6 years, the average age is around 2 years.  I've only ever had one crash.  After a lot of hand-holding, I was able to get it to respond again, but a handful of files were corrupt and so the drive was RMA'd.  It was a Crucial M4, about a year old at the time.

[Thorondor]

I've had a SSD fail but it was one of the earlier OCZs with the crappy JMicron chip.

[ciccio]

if you actively use seagate barracuda hd's, start backup now and thank me later.

yes, Seagate Barracudas fail, and Western Digital Caviars too, and Hitachi-Toshiba too...
In the years I've installed maybe 250 hard drives, and I have about 30 defective units on my shelves.
In this precise moment I'm  retrieving data from a FULL 2 TB Hitachi drive. Windows says it is not formatted, but EaseUS is trying to recover (4 hours to completion..)
Hope everithing goes well: the files are the final edited photos of maybe 25 marriages, and my cousin, the professional photographer, has  no backup.
The backup is of the unedited photos.. He has about 30 external 2 or 3 TB drives, and in 4 years he had 4 total failures, plus 4 or 5 problems that were solved with no data losses.
External drives are, to my experience, more prone to failure than the internal ones. Maybe it is a temperature problem, maybe is mishandling.
Never trust an external drive.

[kripton2035]

Quote from: moya034 on Today at 07:09:18

Speaking of losing data, has anybody had an SSD crash on them?

I install for my customers between 1 and 4 ssd each business day since more than a year
they are mainly samsung evo or pro
I've had some 5 defective items, and most of the time the failure happens when I clone the original drive, so at the beginning of the ssd life.

nice to have is a software that monitors the drive sub smart counters (not the smart flag but the 20 or so counters that trigger the smart hs flag)
the synology or qnap nas monitor them for you and tell you if a drive is falling before it actually fails that's a very nice feature.
should be incorporated in every modern operating system ...

[madires]

Setup a file server with 3 HDD's and RAID 5. Setup a backup server with another 3 HDD's and RAID 5 which replicates any changes made on the file server on a daily basis. If you are concerned about your house burning down, then setup a VPN to your buddy's house and put a file server there

And when you are hit by some crypto malware you won't have a backup since everything is mirrored. It's a good idea to have some older backups too.

[PE1RKI]

no i speak from my own experience about seagate barracuda's.
i had 5 seagate hd's if not more and only 1 is a little bit functioning, the rest all died.
the last 2 gradualy died, i didnt understand exactly what was happening cause i got weird crashes until it was to late.
i lost half a year of my work.
and i have older hitachi and western digital hd's that still work ok.

[eugenenine]

And when you are hit by some crypto malware you won't have a backup since everything is mirrored. It's a good idea to have some older backups too.

Thats why you don't use anything Microsoft for your server either.

[German_EE]

In my case I have a computer savvy friend a couple of Km away and we both hold a backup drive of each other's data. Unless a VERY large meteor lands on Darmstadt we should be safe.

And none of our drives are Seagate