[OT] my hard drive was murdered!

[Martin Maney]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 10:07:35PM -0400, volvoguy wrote:
> drives). The hard drive in question is a Western Digital 160Gb - not
> the mega expensive versions, but not the budget line either. Since the
> BIOS sees the drive, I could probably write down the info for it if it
> would be beneficial at all.

Go get WD's diagnostic proggy from their web site.  Depending on who's
covering the warranty you may need to have its results to get a
replacement anyway.  This sounds exactly like one of two drives that
died some years back - the other was one where you could hear it was in
pain, 'cause modern disk drives don't make that kind of a noise...

Oh, they were both under half a year old when they went.  Both WDs,
too, come to think of it.  Although I strongly suspect there was an
environmental issue at work there, and any drives might well have
failed in the same situation.

> Since we're already having an off-topic conversation already, I would
> also be interested in what other people do to protect (ie. backup)
> large amounts of data like this - either with Ubuntu or Windows. Even
> backing up to DVD means a LOT of blank media for that much data. Do
> people still use tape? RAID? Backup duplicate hard drives that stay

I like RAID as a defense against hard drive failure, though for such a
modest setup doing it with the 3ware cards I prefer does nearly triple
the price compared to a bare IDE drive.  But as they'll tell you, there
are plenty of other ways to lose data than a drive failure.

> disconnected most of the time? That's the main reason I haven't done
> any backups lately - I just don't know HOW to back up that much data.

DVD is pretty cheap, but even the double layer (which is NOT cheap at
this point in time) looks pretty small compared to $100 worth of
commodity IDE drive these days.  Tape drives with the capacity to
handle that volume are just insanely expensive in comparison, but are
the way to go if your data is truly valuable (the incremental cost of
the tapes is low, so archival & off-site storage are likely to actually
happen).  Personally, I find that the data that I'd have to work to
replace (as opposed to downloading another copy of, or not really
needing, just packratting since there's all that disk going to waste
otherwise) is small enough that my only regular backup is a copy to the
server's (RAID) drive.  The stuff I'm actively working on normally gets
a sort of multi-site backup 'cause I sync copies through the subversion
repository, and I archive projects to CDs (or DVDs, recently) at
milestones or releases.

Backup is hard if you don't have money to throw at it.  :-(

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