Hard Drive Failure: it can happen to you!

I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that hard drive failure can strike at the worst possible times.

Like it did for me, today.

I'm sitting here writing a paper on Leibniz and Berkeley, and their views on God's role in day-to-day life. It's due tomorrow at 5 pm, so I was down to about 22 hours left to work on it ... when all of the sudden, my network connection dies. Turns out, the system drive on my router/fileserver failed, taking with it a bunch of random stuff from my past that I'd have liked to keep around, but only had there, figuring it was a newer disk, so it'd be unlikely to die.

Well, wrong! The disk bit the big one, can't even mount the main partition on it anymore.

So ... let that be a reminder to everyone ... if you have data you don't want to lose, make sure it's in more than one place.

Fortunately, I had an older disk lying around unused, so I swapped that in and rebuilt my OS on that... but what a pain in the arse. And at such a bad time.

Now I'm going to be awake and hammering on this paper for the next 18 hours, writing incoherent babble instead of a decent paper. And why? Because my disk died! The bastard!

So, to keep me from going insane and slaughtering the masses in an orgy of blood and fire, I figure ... this has happened to other people too. So tell your story of catastrophic hardware failure! Join in the fun!

So I guess the message of your story is...

"If you have a hundred bucks to burn, set up a RAID 1. If you have a thousand bucks to burn, set up a RAID 5."

The only hard drive that I own and died on me, died after at least ten years of use, heck, the computer wasn't even a pentium!.

But I did had a painful experience with a friends hdd.

Turns out we spent over 6 months doing a team assignment on programming our own personal agenda for a pocket pc. Everything from requeriments, to design, codification, testing and documentation.

We were 6 persons.

Judgment came and we had to hand over our project on cd. It was due to 9am. At 8am everything was ready. We only needed to burn and... voila!!! The hdd of the laptop of the team leader crashed, died and never came back to life!

We were like... oh shit... now what? Fortunately we DID had a perfect copy at another laptop... whose owner did not arrive... The guy did not arrive... so we thought of phoning him... and we got the message on the phone "this number is out of service due to lack of payment".

We were so screwed (later we found this guy had overslept....)

We went and told our sad tale to the professor and he gaves us 1 more hour, to see what we could do.

As the guy with the only other perfect copy was not a viable solution, we searched our other laptops and found a copy that was at about 80% of completion.

Resigning ourselves, we handed that copy. Worst was nothing.

Fortunately the professor still graded us with 80 points out of 100.

But heck, I believe I got a few years older that time.

PS:
Good luck with your assignment complich8.
Hope you finish in time.

Learn from me.

My hard drives never die.

Even so, when I was (man the past tense feels soooo good) studying, I made atleast 2 different up to date backups on seperate media. Usually when I got into the latter stages of a project or assignment I would sometimes have up to 5 different copies of my work in 5 different places.

I had a hard drive scare a few weeks ago. My external hdd was acting strange for a few days then one day it stoped mounting. It took me about a good day of work to get teh ing working again. But i was definatly sweating heavily about all the work i have stored on it. This has made me consider getting another internal drive for my comp.

One of my 250 GB external HDD is always failiing on me. At least I can always do a 'chkdsk h: /f ' on it and I can recover most of it, I always lose around 10-20 GB of shit though. The main problem is not that I actually lost the data. The main problem is that I don't know what data I did lose so that I can redownload it.

I have never had a HD that would have failed in my possession, but I do have an ironic tale to tell, nonetheless. I was once upgrading my video card, and needed to get rid of the old one. A friend needed a video card for a linux server/firewall he was building out of an old system, but he was shrewd, and said he wouldn't buy the video card unless I also sold him my old HD that was pretty much lying around without use, as it had got replaced by a bigger one (I didn't watch anime back then and didn't thus have that huge need for HD space).

Well, I sold him the video card and the HD, and a few months later he told the HD had died...

Well, it goes without saying, obviously, that backing up your data is the most important thing you could possibly do. Hard drives are mechanical devices. They have moving parts inside them that are going to wear out. Sometimes they breakdown over a period of time and sometimes they fail right out of the box. My number one tip to everyone is to right now backup all your information and do it religiously. Backup every single day, especially if you use your computer for business purposes.

My second tip to pass along is to check those backups. Occasionally, go back and make sure you have the critical files you need backed up to whatever medium you’re using.

The third thing I’d say is to store your backup disk off-site. Take it away from your office or entrust it to someone to keep it in a very safe place. That’s important if anything should happen to your facility.

I see these happen alot, it seems that not many people still don't back up their data, even in small doses. I would say the the best way of saving your work in small dose is those USB jump drives. You’ve seen some of these drives, as they seem to be everywhere. They use flash memory, or the same flash memory like what you use to store your pictures on when you’re using a digital camera. Bigger Back-ups should be done on a DVD -/+ RW, or another Hard Drive

Thats just my advice

Well like 6 years ago my hdd burned it was just 8gb or so but it was prety interesting because it was the only thing affected by whatever happened. Right now I have like 6 external hdd and in these 2 years with them I have lost 2 of 250gb that thankfully had guaranty, but yeah like 400 gb of anime, music, videos lost :mad:

I had a spyware infection so bad that popups never stopped showing up. There was so much stuff imbedded into my system that I had to do a full system restore because a lot of files were corrupted. Not a lot of damage but I lost some files and had to re-download many programs.

I've had one harddrive fail on me in the past, a 200 gb at that, and only I believe after about 6 months of service.:(

And I've loaded my computers with so much crap that i've had to restore em several times. Just in the last two months, I had to restore twice, but luckily I booted up knoppix on cd and got all the files I wanted onto my brothers network.:cool: