You might lose all your data in 2016

[rdl]

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

And if it's a small meteor, only one of you has a problem.

 

[Richard Crowley]

Tape is pretty horrible as a medium, too many things to go wrong.

There are FAR FAR FAR fewer "things to go wrong" with digital tape than with ANY kind of hard drive.
That is why probably 99.999999% of all the most valuable data on this planet is archived on digital TAPE.
NOBODY uses hard drives for archival storage. It is just insane.

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.

I have a growing stack of hard drives in the corner (and hundreds of similar experiences from others) that say that is completely incorrect.

[moya034]

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.

+1 on the Microsoft comment... and that's also why you configure your non-windows "backup server" to keep historical copies going back to whatever date you select.

(Edit: Yes I'm a Linux user, but I make my living supporting Microsoft products)

[rsjsouza]

Similar threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ot-backing-up-video-files-long-term/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hard-drive-outside-storage-ideas-and-suggestions/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/backup-strategies/

[eugenenine]

+1 on the Microsoft comment... and that's also why you configure your non-windows "backup server" to keep historical copies going back to whatever date you select.

(Edit: Yes I'm a Linux user, but I make my living supporting Microsoft products)

I got out of MS support and moved into ITRisk so I only use MS stuff when I'm recreating whatever Excel or Sharepoint ate last.

My most important data is synced across two laptops, phone, tablet and backup server via owncloud running on a Raspberry Pi 2 then the lessor important data is backed up to the backup server which is another Raspberry Pi.

[VK3DRB]

The Kodak CD's had a 25 year guarantee of data retention. However this article says they should work for over 200 years... http://www.cd-info.com/archiving/kodak/

Still not as good as the Dead Sea scrolls. And not near as good as Aboriginal cave paintings. I think the human race has too short a view about retaining data, and I suspect there won't we much evidence we existed in 2,000 years, except for the nuclear desolation we left in our wake.

I have only used Seagate Barracudas in the past 12 years. Never had a problem. Terrific drives I trust. Unlike IBM with their appalling Deskstar ("Deathstar") hard disk rubbish.

[Richard Crowley]

The Kodak CD's had a 25 year guarantee of data retention. However this article says they should work for over 200 years... http://www.cd-info.com/archiving/kodak/

Balderdash.  I would be astounded if ANY of the companies offering such outrageous "guarantees" were even in the optical disk business by the end of the "guarantee term".  For example Kodak who doesn't make optical disks anymore, etc.

Besides. What good is the "guarantee".  If you take the disk out after 25 years and you can't read it, will Kodak give you your data back?  Or just the $1.49 you paid tor the disk?

[SeanB]

I got some used Deskstar SCSI drives ( a whole 1G each) so decided, as I had an Adaptec card installed, to use them as scratch drives, making one the Windows Swap drive.  The one I was using as swap is still alive, though the other, just used as some easy to access drive, did die after another year. Stopped using the card after having a capacitor plague induced upgrade to Win7 - new box and simply copied the old HDD contents verbatim over to the new massive ( for a desktop running off a server) 320G drive, then spent a week deciding what was needed and putting in the right new tree.

Still have the100G blob around in case. A few 3G OST files as well, something about a 4G limit really slows searching down.....

[Shock]

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.

As I mentioned there was some bad firmware, it was about 4-5 years ago when the current series of drives were fairly new. If you didn't update the firmware this would eventually lead to a total failure of the disk, but recoverable for someone with enough skill.

Not many people know to watch out for HDD and BIOs firmware causing problems, this is why it pays not to be an early adopter. It still sucks either way but that is electronics and software for you.

[funkyant]

I have to say that I'm surprised to see people vouching for the reliability of SSD's.

In my own experience, the failure rate has been orders of magnitude higher than mechanical drives.

Admittedly my sample size is not massive, however my business was an early adopter of SSD's due to the fact that we build and supply commercial media servers, and the HDD was always a troublesome bottleneck.

In 2010 I must have installed around 50 (or more) SSD's into various sites, and of those 50 around 10 failed within 2 years. And they were not all the same brand. Also just recently I had a Crucial SSD fail in a 20 thousand Euro Lighting Console.

As standard procedure now, we mirror the media stored on SSD's, on regular WD mechanical disks. So the SSD is used for playback and fast access, but the data is stored on a mechanical drive. Basically we use the SSD as a kind of playback media buffer.

As a result of all this, I don't really trust them wholeheartedly.

[VK5RC]

Overall I am more worried about software issues (viruses and poor code) rather than hardware but both are not highly reliable.
In my business I have had more trouble with software problems, 10% of billing data lost but backup saved the day. As not data intensive I use RAID 1 on SSD, 2 off site back ups, different media, alt daily. New box every 3 or so years.

[Shock]

I have a growing stack of hard drives in the corner (and hundreds of similar experiences from others) that say that is completely incorrect.

I'm not talking about drive failures, I'm talking about unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure. I welcome you to dive into the technical aspects rather than just saying I'm wrong (if you still disagree with me).

[Shock]

Seagate Barracudas in the past 12 years. Never had a problem. Terrific drives I trust. Unlike IBM with their appalling Deskstar ("Deathstar") hard disk rubbish.

I knew I missed one I was racking my brain. Quantum fireball and Quantum bigfoot were two of the others.

[kripton2035]

I have only used Seagate Barracudas in the past 12 years. Never had a problem. Terrific drives I trust. Unlike IBM with their appalling Deskstar ("Deathstar") hard disk rubbish.

you can't say "seagate barracudas" like that. there are tens of models of seagate barracudas ! some are good, some are bad
you can refer to a specific model may be
my advice: always look at the warranty length... it's a good keypoint.
some mechanical hard drives have a 5 years warranty, you can trust them more than the others
I saw some ssd with only one year warranty, you should really not trust them - the least must be 3 years
the pro models of ssd have a 10 years warranty.
and as always MAKE BACKUPS EVEN FOR NAS ALWAYS MAKE BACKUPS AND BACKUPS OF THE BACKUPS.

[Richard Crowley]

I'm not talking about drive failures, I'm talking about unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure. I welcome you to dive into the technical aspects rather than just saying I'm wrong (if you still disagree with me).

I dont know whether I agree with you or not because I don't know what you mean by "unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure"?  Can data be recovered from failed hard drives?  Certainly, at tremendous cost. And that is one of the reasons that hard drives are not considered suitable for archival storage.  Not to mention the cost of the "media" (the entire drive with all the mechanical and electronic assemblies, etc, etc.)  It just doesn't make sense on ANY level. Which is why nobody does it.  It has little to do with "the technical aspects", and mostly to do with the "economic aspects" that result from the "technical aspects".

[graciaj]

the cloud is our friend for storage... unfortunatly it has a cost most of the time

[madires]

the cloud is our friend for storage... unfortunatly it has a cost most of the time

... but please don't rely on it! There are things like slow internet access, outages, bankrupt companies and more.

[kripton2035]

the cloud is our friend for storage... unfortunatly it has a cost most of the time

the cloud is not really your friend : in the big text you dont read when you accept their conditions, they tell you they can do anything they want with the datas you provide... so better encrypt them before uploading them if you dont like surprises...
also some clever pirate can find your password and delete anything they can't be responsible for that
and if you don't have a backup somewhere else than the cloud then ...?

[Thorondor]

I don't trust the cloud for anything important. It doesn't matter what the terms of use or laws say - you no longer "own" the data once it's on someone else's servers.

[MrSlack]

This.

Only encrypted stuff hits the cloud for me and the keys station my possession. Encrypted in transport and at rest for the technically inclined.

[Rerouter]

with the barracudas it was the 7200.11's that where effected, most notably the 2TB ones, essentially something went screwy when there power on hours exceeded some value then was power cycled, so an always on wouldn't know until something brought there system down, then magically one or more drives playing dead, for a friend that was all 6 drives in a raid 5 array,

Luckily there was a method written up at the time to upload the new firmware very slowly through the diagnostic pins near the sata plug

[Brumby]

I'm not talking about drive failures, I'm talking about unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure. I welcome you to dive into the technical aspects rather than just saying I'm wrong (if you still disagree with me).

I dont know whether I agree with you or not because I don't know what you mean by "unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure"?  Can data be recovered from failed hard drives?  Certainly, at tremendous cost. And that is one of the reasons that hard drives are not considered suitable for archival storage.  Not to mention the cost of the "media" (the entire drive with all the mechanical and electronic assemblies, etc, etc.)  It just doesn't make sense on ANY level. Which is why nobody does it.  It has little to do with "the technical aspects", and mostly to do with the "economic aspects" that result from the "technical aspects".

I read the "unrecoverable storage media in the event of a failure" as meaning "unable to read from the backup when the primary storage unit fails".

This reminds me of a practice followed at my first employ to address the issue: "Is your backup readable?"

After you write a backup, how many of you actually check to see that it is readable?  How many of you have taken a flash drive that says it's 32GB and just used it - trusting that it IS capable of holding 32GB.  The last time I purchased a couple of 32GB micro SD cards, I ran them through a write/verify utility that showed them to actually have only 8GB of memory.  It was simply an 8GB chip reprogrammed to declare 32GB.  You could write 32GB to it and it would all look rosy - until you tried to read it back.

Then there's the case of magnetic media.  As I understand it, magnetic domains are subject to weakening by thermal processes as well as changing magnetic fields. which - in our daily environment - means they will reach a point where data integrity will be lost.  Admittedly, we could be talking years or maybe even decades, but the risk is there.  The solution is simple - just copy the data and the magnetic domains will be as good as new.


And if you want to really test out you 'backups' - try this exercise ....

1. Get yourself a computer system ready to use - but with completely blank drives.  That is, hardware only.
2. Consider the location your system is normally run from as having been totally destroyed by, say, fire.  (So you can't grab that 'cheat sheet' pinned to your wall.)
3. Get all your 'backups' and 'restore' to this system.

Can you do it?
Do you have all the software?  O/S?  Licences?  Do you need/have the installation discs?  Product keys?  Updates?  If you need to partition drives in a particular way, do you have the means to do it?

For bonus points, send the person who knows all the ins and outs away for a couple of days (without a mobile phone) while you do this.  In real life, they may have been hospitalised as a result of the 'fire'.


How would you go?

[kripton2035]

using apple time machine, everything is verified periodically automatically for you...

[rdl]

What is so special about 2016?   

You can lose data at anytime.

[SpidersWeb]

It's not relevant to modern drives so much, but for anyone who is interested I have a lot of hard drive units from the 80's 90's and 2000's - and honestly couldn't find any large link between brand and failure rate. Seagate, WD, Quantum, etc I only have ~100-150 drives, so it's a small sample size, but I haven't been able to develop any stereotypes in the IDE generation.

In the current market, I wont trust Samsung Spinpoint mechanical drives (SSD seem fine) nor Seagate 7200.11's (but you don't see those much anymore).

For backups, I'm often too lazy to do it properly, so now I just install drives in pairs, and have one automatically backup to the other each night. It's not as good as off-site or even disconnected from the machine itself - but it's saved my ass on many occasions. I use this method rather than mirroring because it prevents even wear on the drives - I don't want to increase the probability of my backup drive failing at the same time the primary does.

For someone with a laptop, external HDD is what I'd use.