Members keybdwizrd Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 Well, the unthinkable happened... the 3.5 year old HD in my iMac took a dump. My local Apple store replaced it in a hurry (with a bigger drive), and gave it back to me with a fresh install of OSX 10.6.3. Being a good computer user, I've been running Time Machine backups with an external WD drive. Regardless, I've never had to restore a drive from a backup before, and was very nervous. Amazingly, Time Machine did it's thing, and my system is now completely restored. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members soundwave106 Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 Had to do the same this month with *two* computers (one via death of a hard drive, one because of a f'n rootkit... ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mididoc Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 Yes I have been bitten by HDD failures numerous times over the years, particularly recent as I believe QC is slipping at the factories that make 'em. But I was taught long ago (in the Atari ST floppy disk days) that data doesn't really exist unless it exists in at least 2 separate places. Been a devout backup guy ever since. Saved my skin a few times too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members polar69 Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 You're only as good as your last backup. Something my son learnt when he realised his experimentation with dual booting his pc didn't go quite as well as planned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Michoo Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 As an IT guy, I may say: there are two categories of people - those, who are making backups, and those, who WILL be doing backups Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members seamonkey Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 One has to wonder what is going on over at Apple. Is there a crink in the armor? Not an expert by any means, so I ask is this(3.5)the average lifespan for one of these HD's?The reason I ask is my daughter's husband works at Pfzier and was able to purchase a Macbook at a very good price. As I understand, they used it for personal and some business needs, but not overly used. Recently the hard drive burned up on them, and it was only 8 months old.She said once she began telling other's of this, one or two of her friends said their hard drives burned up within the warranty period as well. I use my Dell desktop hard drive extensively, have had it over 7 years and it still works fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members soundwave106 Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 Not an expert by any means, so I ask is this(3.5)the average lifespan for one of these HD's? The warranty period for most hard drives is between 1 and 3 years. The hard drive that failed for me was about 4 and 1/2 years old. Normally I would start to get nervous about a hard drive over 5 years old (eg not put anything critical on it) but not before then. I do think manufacturing quality of PC parts has fallen in recent years so I'm not so sure now. Hard drive failure is really only one reason to do full backups. I've probably used backups more often to get a file I've accidentally overwritten or changed then to do a full system restore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Acid Hazard Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 I failed and didn't make back ups of all my more recent tracks. And now the HD that they're all on is not being seen by my PC. I don't know if it failed or what, but it's not there. And now i can't get to those tracks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted January 16, 2011 Author Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 And now i can't get to those tracks. Well, that's unfortunate. I'm not a tech guru, so I don't have any suggestions as to how to try and access a drive that has become unreachable. The Mac OS has a built in feature called "Time Machine" that does incremental backups every hour, automatically. About all you have to do is plug in a drive, designate it for backups, and turn Time Machine on. I never knew for sure if it worked or not until yesterday. If you're not doing full backups, simply saving copies of songs to a USB stick is a good idea. This is what I used to do. Regarding quality control issues at Apple... my guess is that the drives inside their machines (like my iMac) is simply a drive made by WD, Seagate, or any of the major manufacturers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Gribs Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 All the guys around me at work know to keep all their work on a server having a managed backup and not rely on their laptop hard drives as they almost always take a dump. But what to do with personal stuff on home computers? I don't have a laptop at home anymore, but we do have a couple of desk tops. I have been meaning to ask here if anyone uses an online backup service and whether you would or would not recommend your particular service. I think that it would be a good idea to backup my stuff online some place, especially all of my family photos. As for laptop hard drive failure rates, as I posted in a different thread about 1 in 5 laptops will fail due to a hardware issue during their first three years of use. Apple is in the middle of the pack. I just think this is "par for the course" for laptops and a necessary risk one takes using them. So keep your stuff backed up and consider your laptop a relatively non-stable system. Any anecdotal comments like "my brand X laptop lasted 8 years without a failure" are just that: anecdotal, and do not take into account a sufficient sample size to be relevant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members The groin Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 I failed and didn't make back ups of all my more recent tracks. And now the HD that they're all on is not being seen by my PC. I don't know if it failed or what, but it's not there. And now i can't get to those tracks. I feel your pain, man. The exact same thing happened to me last year. I was scared {censored}less at the mere thought of a HDD failure so I bought two of the (supposedly) most fail-resistant discs on the market, and put them in RAID mode. And what do you know, about a year and a half later one of them couldn't be found. "{censored} it" I thought, "I still have that other disc and my seven years older computer that has the cheapest disc available at the time has never failed" and kept going. Sure enough, a couple of months later the other disc failed too. Must've been a bad batch or something. That got me fed up with computers and I bought a tape recorder porta. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members carbon111 Posted January 16, 2011 Members Share Posted January 16, 2011 I failed and didn't make back ups of all my more recent tracks. And now the HD that they're all on is not being seen by my PC. I don't know if it failed or what, but it's not there. And now i can't get to those tracks. If it's SATA, bring it by and I'll do a recovery on it. If it's an older IDE drive or an external drive, you may have to leave it for a couple days. Regardless, let's see what we can do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members playstation Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 The Mac OS has a built in feature called "Time Machine" that does incremental backups every hour, automatically. About all you have to do is plug in a drive, designate it for backups, and turn Time Machine on. I never knew for sure if it worked or not until yesterday. How much memory does it take to do this? I have a Mybook 500g usb drive that I have been putting logic project folders on, and the iMac keeps aking me if I want to use time machine but I have been saying no cuz i wasn't really sure what it was. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted January 17, 2011 Author Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 How much memory does it take to do this? I have a Mybook 500g usb drive that I have been putting logic project folders on, and the iMac keeps aking me if I want to use time machine but I have been saying no cuz i wasn't really sure what it was. I am not an expert on this, but ideally the drive used for Time Machine should be at least as large as the drive you're backing up. I believe you have to use a drive dedicated for Time Machine use, or a drive that is partitioned (whereby you can specify a partition). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ChristianRock Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 Since we are talking hard drive failures and backups... My 2-year old 500Gb backup USB hard drive died last month. It pisses me off greatly... especially since I've had problems with all my other machines (two) last year. So now I have to go out and buy another one. Great. And people ask me, why do I keep my music stuff away from computers... By the way, how much more reliable are SSDs supposed to be compared to regular hard drives? Would I be better off in the long run by buying one of those instead? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Spacebagel Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 I heartily recommend getting an on-line backup solution. That way you can easily setup frequent automatic backups, you don't need to mess with plugging additional hardware in, and you're also safe from theft. Most of these are $5 a month or so and usually you just need to install the software and the rest takes care of itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted January 17, 2011 Author Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 I heartily recommend getting an on-line backup solution. What service do you use? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members soundwave106 Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 By the way, how much more reliable are SSDs supposed to be compared to regular hard drives? Would I be better off in the long run by buying one of those instead? At this point, I would say that SSDs are *less* reliable than regular hard drives. You get them these days for performance reasons. I think eventually SSDs will become more reliable, but I'm not sure that they are even on par with regular hard drives now. (I just got a SSD for the new Windows 7 computer, so we'll see. ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ChristianRock Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 At this point, I would say that SSDs are *less* reliable than regular hard drives. You get them these days for performance reasons. I think eventually SSDs will become more reliable, but I'm not sure that they are even on par with regular hard drives now. (I just got a SSD for the new Windows 7 computer, so we'll see. ) Hmmm could this throw a wrench into my Kronos plans?... The online backup option does look interesting by the way... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members carbon111 Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 At this point, I would say that SSDs are *less* reliable than regular hard drives. Sort of. SSDs are an order of magnitude more reliable than mechanical hard drives due to the lack of moving parts. The downside is that their longevity is finite due to the technology used. The RAM used has a finite erase/write life. Garbage collection and maintenance firmware keep memory locations out of circulation as they go bad. Leveling algorithms make sure all memory locations are used equally. Catastrophic failure of the type mechanical drives are prone to is very unlikely. Projected life spans of a minimum of about 5 years are the current consensus. All my PCs have SSD boot drives at this point with large mechanical drives for apps and backup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members soundwave106 Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 SSDs are an order of magnitude more reliable than mechanical hard drives due to the lack of moving parts. The downside is that their longevity is finite due to the technology used. Yep, limited writes (albeit quite high limited writes, theoretically it should be years worth). Also, I know that OSs not optimized for SSD (eg all Windows OSs before Windows 7) could potentially perform way more writes than optimal. Regardless, I see some "poof!" type SSD error reports and reportedly similar RMA rates. They are not bulletproof yet. Perhaps the controller board / manufacturing process is not quite refined yet, as I would think an SSD should not be RMAed as much as a hard drive. I should emphasize that "not as reliable" does not mean "piece of {censored}". More like "2% of SSDs will be RMAed, 1.9% of HDDs will be RMAed". Not a huge difference. I have an SSD based netbook in addition to the new Windows 7 machine, and another external SSD that's doing storage. Both are two years old and have absolutely no problems. I went the SSD boot drive route for the latest machine, and there's no way I wouldn't do this for future machines. (As long as you know that nothing is bulletproof, and still backup often.) And for equipment that is going to be moved around a lot (like a Korg Kronos that you gig with), an SSD is going to be *way* more reliable than a HDD. (I do wonder if the Kronos does allow you to make backups though.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members BonsoWonderDog Posted January 17, 2011 Members Share Posted January 17, 2011 All the guys around me at work know to keep all their work on a server having a managed backup and not rely on their laptop hard drives as they almost always take a dump. But what to do with personal stuff on home computers? I don't have a laptop at home anymore, but we do have a couple of desk tops. I have been meaning to ask here if anyone uses an online backup service and whether you would or would not recommend your particular service. I am running a Windows Home Server which automatically backs up all the PC's/laptops in my house each day....works like a treat. Although, apparently the next version "VAIL" is dropping that functionality, inexplicably. Re online backup - I would not trust putting all my valuable info "in the cloud". Photos and music perhaps, but not financial details, passwords etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ghostpaw Posted January 18, 2011 Members Share Posted January 18, 2011 Stuff happens no matter how hard we try. I've used http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ a few times when we've been in a pinch. They are pricey but they even helped recover data from a hard drive that had been in a fire. They can get to data that other shops would write off as irretrievable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members carbon111 Posted January 18, 2011 Members Share Posted January 18, 2011 Ghost is great if you're on the PC side of things. Just add a dedicated storage HD, set it and forget it. I love it! Saved by ass a couple of times now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TechEverlasting Posted January 18, 2011 Members Share Posted January 18, 2011 And for equipment that is going to be moved around a lot (like a Korg Kronos that you gig with), an SSD is going to be *way* more reliable than a HDD. (I do wonder if the Kronos does allow you to make backups though.) SSD reliability is going to be a major concern for anyone playing those gorgeous multi-gigabyte streaming grand pianos on the Kronos. Let's hope those pianos sound just as glorious after two or three years of continuous use, which will represent an inconceivable number of SSD reads. I wonder if it will be possible to have a backup SSD drive for the Kronos. I might want one if I was using the instrument on a long running piano-intensive tour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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