Aug 122010
Update: the data on the trashed hard drive is apparently all recoverable. I just got a list of everything on the drive they can recover… a list 5,966 pages long (yow). 878 gig. Cost: just under a grand. Ouch. First thing to do when I get the new drive: copy all that crap over onto *another* one, and *really* start cranking out the DVDs
Let this be a lesson to y’all. Especially y’all who are serious about archiving data.
Because I was too cheap (i.e. “broke”) to spend $130 for a new backup drive, I got to spend $260 for *two* drives, along with a grand for the data. Am I still broke? Hell, no! Now I’m in debt! I’m living like the US Government! Wooo!!!
13 Responses to “Yay (?)”
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Good that you got the data back.
I’ve always thought of external hard drives as backup drives, because every single one my friends have had, have failed! They get subjected to shocks and temperature differentials, and their cooling might be not very good, so they wear much faster than hardrives inside the computer itself.
A good plan is for you to have 2 drives; the as the work drive and the other a drive where you make backups to. But remember never to overwrite the backup, if the data drive becomes unreadable or downright fails, then you could have half-overwritten and totally unusable backup as well! Do incremental backups or perhaps keep 2 backups (perhaps having 2 backup drives and alternating their usage every week…)
Just my 2cents, I know it won’t help your account balance..
Well the lesson I took from my data disaster was that you don’t have a backup if you can’t restore from your backup.
Congratulations, Scott.
You deserve better karma. I suspect you may win the lottery, after all this.
Scott: Have you considered Carbonite? The online backup service is dirt-cheap — I pay just $49 a year — and it’s automatic. Not sure of its capacity, but even if you have to pay a “premium” rate, it’s gotta be cheaper than buying two hard drives.
>I suspect you may win the lottery, after all this.
I have little doubt that that’s not far away…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery
> Have you considered Carbonite?
Yes, indeed. And I’ve even done the math:
1) The crashed hard drive had 878 gig on it
2) My upload speed out here in the sticks is a little better than 1 meg per minute
3) That works out to 878,000 minutes
4) or 14,633 hours
5) or 609 days
This seems a bit cumbersome.
There’s a dark side to you, Scott. Somehow that story got past Dr Turney when I first took his class; I’d not heard of it.
Good plot for M. Night Shyamalan. I hate his movies.
> I’d not heard of it.
I read it in grade school. It’s quite well known.
Well, “The Lottery” never appeared in my world, as best I can remember. It’s not the kind of story I’d care about. At the time most kids were reading Great Literature for a class, I was poking about for photos of German submarines from WW2. A bunch of provincials killing each other wouldn’t attract my attention.
Oh, wait ….
> It’s not the kind of story I’d care about.
I read a whole shelf full of stuff I didn’t care about while in grade school, because I was told to. Then they let me have free run of the library, and I read a whole shelf of stuff I *did* care about. One vaguely clear memory is my discovery of some tattered old copies of the Tom Swift Jr. books. Woo!
I remember seeing the 1969 film version in school back in my junior high school years( about mid 70’s).
> I read a whole shelf full of stuff I didn’t care about while in grade school,
> because I was told to.
Classics Illustrated was my friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics_Illustrated
I vaguely remember that years ago, the developers of the proposed movie Man Conquers Space suffered a severe blow when their hard drive died.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Conquers_Space