[The Gas Man]

Hi Everyone,

 

I've got a burning query relating to Data Storage and I'm hoping for some invaluable opinions and guidance from the all knowledgeable members of Geeks to go 

 

As long as I can remember I've had issues with data storage, whether it be filling up my top of the range 120 GB hard disk back in the day or losing invaluable data to a failing hard disk. As many of you out there, over the years I have accumulated a wealth of data that holds a resounding sentimental and functional value to me. This data is currently spread across 2 x 2 TB Western Digital My Book Essential external disks as well as an array of flash drives and optical media.

 

Today I have plugged in one of the aforementioned Western Digital My Books into my Windows 8.1 operated ASUS only to be confronted by the dreaded click of death. The drive booted up fine and I was browsing my files for some time before the click of death began, it went through a few attempted spin cycles and a dialogue box appeared dutifully notifying me of the hardware malfunction. Following this the drive could no longer be read by my machine, I tried all 4 USB ports as well as multiple restarts of the drive without success. I then took out my old Acer laptop off of 2008, brushed off the dust and cobwebs, filled it's batteries and booted it up. Once the old beauty had booted I plugged in the seemingly dead Western Digital to be once again greeted by the familiar knocking of the disks guts. The disk continued to knock for a good number of cycles before the Windows XP powered Acer showed me hope. The disk was successfully recognised by the Acer laptop and was assigned disk designation 'F'. Double clicking on the F I was greeted by further success, the file structure seemingly intact as I browsed my glorious archive of 1's and 0's. I am now in the process of slowly but surely moving each folder from the Western Digital to a new drive where it shall hopefully stay corruption free for many moons to come. 

 

The problem I am faced with is that this is not the first time I've had the click of death, nor will it be my last. What can I do to stop this happening? I recently lost my Father which makes some of the data (photos etcetera) truly invaluable. 

 

I was looking at buying a WD My Cloud EX 2 unpopulated and follow it up with a couple of the new WD 6TB disks to make a 12TB raid machine (this way it will be future proof) but will it be reliable? What are the most reliable ways (other than multiple hard disk backups) for me to ensure I will never lose my data?

 

Cheers

Edited by The Gas Man, 03 November 2014 - 12:16 PM.

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   The Gas Man,

 

Unfortunately there is no infallible way as nothing is 100% failure proof, having multiple back ups of smaller 1TB HDDs is easier to maintain with your most valuable data also stored off site as a precaution, some UK Cloud storage providers that you can use as an example of costs and the services provided can be found here 

 

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[phillpower2]

   The Gas Man,

 

Unfortunately there is no infallible way as nothing is 100% failure proof, having multiple back ups of smaller 1TB HDDs is easier to maintain with your most valuable data also stored off site as a precaution, some UK Cloud storage providers that you can use as an example of costs and the services provided can be found here 

 

NB: So that I can confirm that you have received notification of my reply to your topic please click on the Follow this topic tab at the upper right corner of the page. 

[The Gas Man]

Thanks Phillpower2 for your reply, shy bunch here @ Geeks to go. Privacy has always been a concern of mine when looking at Cloud based storage but I will consider it again. 

[phillpower2]

You are most welcome The Gas Man 

[terry1966]

as you've found out there really is nothing you can do to stop any type of hard drive failing and thereby losing important data if not backed up.

 

personally i hate cloud storage and would never use it for my own backups.

 

the only really safe way to backup your important data is to have a backup of your backup with at least 1 copy being off site.

 

personally i use a mirrored raid 1 data storage drive and then also have a separate backup drive, so all my important data is on at least 3 hard drives at any one time. drawback with my method is if the system got malware (unlikely in my case but possible.) then there's a good chance 1 backup copy (the raided drive, ) would get infected at the same time as my os drive, so in reality maybe losing 2 out of the 3 copies on hard drives if the malware was bad enough.

then for my most important data that would break my heart to lose like personal photo's and stuff, that is also copied to dvd's making that a 4th copy and kept round my daughters home (i know of at least 1 person who keeps their off site backup at their bank.)

 

Edited by terry1966, 08 November 2014 - 02:37 PM.