Reply to: How do you back up your personal data?

[original PM]

spank the important ones onto bluu disk?

they should last for 30-100 years

but yes ultimately all of your data's will be gone.

[Platypus]

Put it in a plastic bag then put that in the freezer for a week (seriously). Then try again. You might get another 30 minutes out of the drive. Google if you don't believe me. It worked for me once but my drive only lived for another few minutes. Some say they were able to recover all their data. YMMV.

[The Spartan]

@OP - stupid question but... you have confirmed its the disk itself and not the chassis - last few I have looked at have turned out to be reasonable disks inside awful cheap eastern-manufacture casings and its the electronics in the case thats failed, eliciting similar read/write faults.

Each time I've pulled the disk out and connected direct with SATA>>USB cable they're read/recovered fine.

Probably barking up wrong tree as you did mention testdisk - nice little tool, but just asking in case...

Nah that's not a stupid question, I did indeed take it out of the enclosure and got it to run for a bit till it packed up completely and died I managed to get 10% of the overall pictures on there back. Lesson learned but a harsh one at that, I blame technology lol as otherwise they'd have all been printed off and put in albums before the advent of digital cameras

[stek]

How do you back up your personal data?

Just got a Sun L9 LTO1 autochanger, free from my kit supplier cos I get loads from him, will do 900gb uncompressed, not bad.

Except I've no tapes...

[AtW]

Sign up for facebook and they'll back up all your personal data with you...

[redgiant]

Sorry to hear about the data loss

I have been using a WHS2011 server setup at home for the last two years that cost less than £300 (HP Microserver + WHS2011 + 2x 2TB HDDs in RAID0) that backs up all my machines nightly (12:00 - 2:00). Once setup with a plug-in called Lights-Out it turns on each day for the backup period or on demand whenever I want to pull content from it (it also stores all my media and downloads).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ProLiant-N40...pr_product_top

[Platypus]

^ WHS

Good idea

Last disk failure I had was an enclosure failure not the disc

For lost data I've had some success with this: Unformat and File Recovery Software for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/Windows7/Windows8
although if the disk is in the process of hard failure, running a tool like this which works the disc very hard will ensure that it fails sooner rather than later. Caveat Emptor.

[monkfish]

@OP - stupid question but... you have confirmed its the disk itself and not the chassis - last few I have looked at have turned out to be reasonable disks inside awful cheap eastern-manufacture casings and its the electronics in the case thats failed, eliciting similar read/write faults.

Each time I've pulled the disk out and connected direct with SATA>>USB cable they're read/recovered fine.

Probably barking up wrong tree as you did mention testdisk - nice little tool, but just asking in case...

[Lockhouse]

I have a Raided home server, 2 x offline 2Tb drives and many, many DVDs.

[TheFaQQer]

you can send it off to get it recovered from the platters I think

I tried that and all I got was a video of The Great Pretender

[Spacecadet]

but have 90GB of photos and about the same in home videos so would be a pig to upload to start with...

Leave it running for a week, it will probably finish sooner than you think

[TheFaQQer]

Manual backup to NAS (QNAP 6.5TB with RAID).

Photos all go to Flickr.

Really important documents go to dropbox or are in email as well.

I'm also considering backing this on Kickstarter as an alternative backup cloud device.

[doodab]

I have several "primary" hard drives, these are backed up to other hard drives, so I have the original and two copies of everything, one of the copies lives in a secure storage unit along with several bicycles and some other stuff that I don't know where it came from but I can't throw it away just in case I need it.

I actually lost everything due to a HDD failure many years ago. I was upset at the time but in retrospect it was very liberating.

[The Spartan]

There is no such thing as a reliable HDD and you should not keep anything on any HDD that you cannot afford to lose (unless it's backed up).

Got that right devastated is an understatement, I'm going to put a copy on each of the 3 laptops, a pendrive and in the cloud after this experience

[Platypus]

I'm PC based so My Documents on Drive C is copied using sync software to Drive D which also hold stuff such as photos (total of 1TB). This drive is then synced to a 3TB drive which also holds daily backups of the complete C drive for the past week. This 3TB drive is then sync'ed to another pair of identical 3TB drives.

My Documents also copied to Dropbox and Google Drive. But not my photos. This I must fix!

So my critical work-related docs are on 5 local hard drives and 2 cloud locations. My photos are on 4 local hard drives.

I'd never ever use an external HDD to back up anything! Have you read the reviews on Amazon? There is no such thing as a reliable HDD and you should not keep anything on any HDD that you cannot afford to lose (unless it's backed up).