Back Up Your Hard Drive!!!

snoop69

snoop69

Suspended / Banned
Messages
2,451
Name
Paul
Edit My Images
Yes
I was in the process of backing up 25gb of photo's stored on an external
Hitachi Travelstar hard drive when it went & died.

The drive keeps stalling & the disc alignment is suspect.

Western Digital & Ontrack have both quoted in excess of £2k for data
recovery.

As the drive's 'motherboard' has fried,the disc's need removing & then
re-aligning before data can be read.

Dont put off what you can do today :thumbs:
 
If it's just the controller there's a couple of things you can try. Remove the hard drive from the caddy and try installing it in your pc as a slave drive. If that doesn't work, you may be able to buy an identical drive and swap over the control boards. In either case it's only to gain access to the data, once you have it, dump the drive and buy a new one.
 
If its a 2.5" or 3.5" Sata hard drive I have a caddy that you just drop the hard drive in and attach it to the pc via a USB lead. You may be able to save the data by just dropping the bare drive into it, I did when the laptop drive failed earlier this year.

Am only just up the M2 in Sittingbourne as well if you needed it.

Jeff
 
snoop69 said:
I was in the process of backing up 25gb of photo's stored on an external
Hitachi Travelstar hard drive when it went & died.
Click to expand...
not so long ago Ive lost over 400gb :D ...i was one happy bunny ...
 
Hi guys,

I was using the hard drive externally in a caddy.

On the reverse of the drive is a white pvc sticker approx the size of
a 10p piece which looks like it has melted.

The drive doesnt spin up at all & is not recognized by Windoze at all.

The drive has been checked using 'Hard Drive Fitness Test' but that
could not find it.

I have spoken to OnTrack who for £75 will issue a report & offer a solution
for recovery.
As the drive has been stalling & contains two plates they are likley to be
out of synch & will need re-setting under lab conditions.

If this is the case then im looking at a cost of £750 - £900 :eek:

My father has some files in a reduced quality state so thats better than
nothing but the rest are candids of my kids etc & also my first un-official
wedding shoot :'(
 
i agreeb with the original post, my laptop went apes*** last week and ive lost the last 6 months of photos that i had stored on it plus a few other odds and sods, most of it wasnt that important but ive lost my holiday photos which is a bit of a pain in the arse as i hadnt even got round to printing them off for the album!
 
i feel for you. hope you can sort something out

i lost about 8gb of data not long ago but it wasnt "that" important, couple of outings this year and a fair few of friends cars i have taken

i've since gone down the NAS way with a Raid 1 mirror so it saves basically copies one disk to another . maybe its worth looking at for the future to save things like this

good luck
 
whitey said:
i've since gone down the NAS way with a Raid 1 mirror so it saves basically copies one disk to another . maybe its worth looking at for the future to save things like this

good luck
Click to expand...

Same setup I have, but that doesn't cover OS meltdown. :( I didn't even think about it when I set up the RAID. Technically, data should be salvagable even if the OS goes down right?
 
with NAS yes

mine is in a seperate box and connects via a RJ45 netowrk cable (it can be connected to router to and go via that to any PC) you can install FTp and accounts and access from any PC anywhere

mine doesnt backup the OS but gives me the saved data i need to use

you can setup RAID drives as bootables within a PC but it would involve re formatting and configuring

i dont mind a re-install if it goes belly up as it doesnt take to long as all my saved data goes onto a different drive
 
If you're using an external drive for backups you might want to have a play with the built in windows tool "robocopy". It's VERY fast, fully functional but unfortunately command line based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

I use this daily on our servers because as it's name states, it's very ROBUST!

I have my desktop at home configured to automatically switch on on the first of the month at 3am, run a scheduled task to fire off robocopy and then automatically shut down. It also runs once a week if the machine is on at the time (the monthly backup is just an extra insurance that it has been done).

The great thing with robocopy is that with a simple command line switch you can get it to mirror the drive content. So anything you've added OR deleted from the master folder gets duplicated on the mirror.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top