Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Scared for real!

Not so long ago I bought a 1TB LaCie external hard rive to store the wast amount of photos that have piled up on different hard drives during the last years.

This weekend I started to do some more serious cleaning at home. I had some music playing in the living room while I was scrubbing the cupboard shelves clean. After a while I went to the living room and there was a strange clicking sound that was clearly notable in the music. Turned the music off and the clicking sound was even more notable, started to try locate the sound...

Argh!! The metallic sound came from my new hard drive! Managed to shut down my computer, it got a bit confused not being able to communicate with the drive no more but eventually the computer shut down and the drive that's USB connected also winded down, pulled out all the cords fron the drive and I let it cool down.

Didn't dare to connect the drive until the next morning and to my big relief it spun up just like normally and I could access the files without problem and getting strange noises from the drive. Puh! I quickly copied all the new files that I didn't have any copies of on other drives.

Definitely an eyeopener on the importance of making regular 'back-up's'! Luckily it was only about 30GB that wasn't backed up. Started looking for a new 1TB while the drive was cooling noticed that the prices have been standing still since I bought my drive. The idea of a RAID:ed NAS once again came to mind. Perhaps start looking for how much one has to pay for internet based storage...

3 comments:

  1. Great the disk spun up again! Hard drives tend to fail the first six months or after a couple of years.

    I copy all my important files to both a NAS and a USB-drive. The USB-drive is only attached when I do the backups. This way I have three copies of all files (main computer, NAS and USB-drive) and should lightning or a JPG-eating virus strike I still have the files on a unplugged device.

    I should keep the USB-drive at work, that way I would be safe from fire as well.

    Also, I should do the backup routine, it's been a while now...

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  2. PS: I have that Homer-scream poster. :)

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  3. Hehee.. Yeah, better safe than sorry in this case, that's why I would like to have somewhere else than home where to store copys of my photos.

    Keeping finges crossed that 2TB drives gets cheaper fast. :)

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