Comments on: When backups fail

By: Martin Weiss

Martin Weiss — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:30:43 +0000

I’ve recently bought myself a Drobo, which is basically a 4 drive harddisk box, that automatically makes backups of whatever is on it. In case of a drive failure, you just put in a new disk, and all your data remains intact, and backed-up.

I do a lot of graphic/video work, and there a remote backup is just not (yet) feasible.

And on really, really important projects, I make an extra backup on a little portable LaCie disk, and take that one home.

Lovely theme you have made here for WP. Congratulations.

By: Chris Murphy

Chris Murphy — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:32:03 +0000

I’m slowly accepting that my drive is gone for good — Its quite upsetting, but as you’ve pointed out , it’s also a lesson learned. Thankfully it wasn’t my MP3 collection or my e-mail, so I can breathe a little easier.

I did ask my friend, Jon Snook, to hook me up with SVN and it is a feature on the hosting package, so I’ve backed up all of my development files (and writing files) to SVN and I can breathe a little easier now that I know my recent work is relatively safe — especially my themes.

I’m going to look at S3 this weekend and see if it’s a good fit. FYI XDrive is a POS to register with — a co-worker tried it out and the registration process crapped out on him, seemingly unable to handle postal codes outside of the US. I should send them a note.

By: Christina Warren

Christina Warren — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:40:47 +0000

Chris,

Ouch - yeah, that actually makes sense - I guess because the drive was what was overloaded, not the enclosure. Still, ouch! Best of luck, dude - yeesh. We’ve all been there. And not that it helps anything AT ALL, but it usually just takes one instance like this to make a person back-up conscious for life (I’m still lamenting the e-mail loss of 2000 that took 3.5 years of e-mail and the MP3 Meltdown of 2002 that took half my collection (and it happened literally the month before I bought my first iPod).

I like Amazon’s S3 A LOT — you can even host SVN stuff there (though if your web server can do it, I’m sure that would be easier). I keept stuff backed up to an external local drive but for important folders, I have them tagged to automatically upload to Amazon at night (using the command line and Apple Script, but something identical could be written for Windows) once a week.

By: Chris Murphy

Chris Murphy — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:56:19 +0000

Hi Christina, thanks for the hint about Amazon’s S3 — I’m looking into it today for some of my personal files. I also have subversion setup on my domain now, so I’m going to start migrating my theme work and dev work to SVN. As for my HD, it’s an IDE drive so I was able to plug it into my desktop system to trouble shoot it. I’ve also attempted connecting it through different enclosures with no success. But what I did find curious was the fact that the original enclosure that it was “fried” in was still functioning quite well. After some tests, it appears that it is the actual drive that is problematic. It isn’t powering up, which means the control board is toast. It appears that I’m either going to have to attempt swapping control boards from another drive (same make & model) or digging a small grave in my frozen backyard.

*Prays for a small miracle*

By: Christina Warren

Christina Warren — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:46:06 +0000

I’m assuming you accidentally fried your external USB or firewire drive — couple of questions, before you either pay way too much for data recovery or write the whole thing off:

Have you taken the drive out of the enclosure and tried to connect it to a computer? If it’s a laptop drive you can very easily get a ribbon adaptor that will connect the portable drive to a full size IDE or SATA cable/power connection.

If you have tried to connect the drive itself to another computer,
is it get recognized at all?

Have you tried putting the drive in the freezer and then accessing it from the computer?

I ask because if you can actually access the drive, the data might be salvageable using software, rather than being forced to pay $700+ for data recovery.

I like your post! The only thing to be careful of, if using a shared hosting plan for back-up, is that you make sure that’s kosher with the host. Most hosts don’t care (I know mine doesn’t even if they don’t explicitly allow me to use my space the way I do), but they’ll often put provisions in their contracts like the space must be for hosted content and not data back-ups. For a temporary or stop-gap solution, it isn’t usually a problem, but for long-term offsite storage, Amazon’s S3 service (either with JungleDisk or via the command line) is my personal favorite. Mozy isn’t bad, but we had a reader have major issues with his restore (took 12 hours to access his data, he then had to download 100 dmg files to get his data, huge pain: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/19/whats-your-offsite-backup-solution-ask-dls/).

(former computer technician/remaining computer geek)
– Christina