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12 week? Even 12 months is just the beginning...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: 12 week? Even 12 months is just the beginning..
It is obviously a remedial course.
I learned everything I know in 12 minutes. 
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Another scam aimed at the confused and vulnerable.
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I'm the guy who buys drives in sets of 4...one live, one offline backup sitting next to the computer, another backup at the office (I swap drives once a month), and one more spare blank drive ready to go the moment one of the other ones fails. That's for my important stuff.
Yet I managed to lose a few hundred GBs worth of crap. Nothing important at all, mind you--I tend to accumulate a whole season's worth of TV shows as individual episodes are being broadcast, then I binge-watch over a few evenings (think Tivo on the cheap). That was that drive's single purpose and it contained nothing else.
Of course, this isn't included as part of my regular backup set, as it's stuff I'll watch once and then delete. But I did have a large(-ish) backlog of stuff I was sitting on due to lack of time. Well, I just took care of that problem.
This was all on single drive in a USB enclosure, hooked up to a PC that's connected to my projector. I needed to move a few dozen GBs worth of files on to the drive, so I figured I'd save a bit of time transferring them over the LAN, by hooking up the USB enclosure instead directly to the PC that had the files. I hooked the drive up to a cheap-ass 10-port USB hub I've had for years, but still worked "well enough" if I just stayed away from a few of the ports I knew were flakey...Windows initially failed to detect the drive at all...tried a few other ports...eventually it showed up in Device Manager, but Disk Manager insisted it was uninitialized (and do I want to have it use MBR or GPT). Of course I knew that to be wrong...changed to a port that's built into the machine instead of going through the hub...same thing.
Hooked the drive back up to the original machine...and now it insists it's uninitialized. The only undelete utilities I've come across need the drive to at least have a drive letter assigned to it - which it didn't.
Now...I don't necessarily care to try to recover each and every file...but I'd like to at least be able to get the folder structure so I can at least know WTF was on that drive to begin with...
The lesson here - if it's not important enough to backup, then at the very least you should still produce, somehow, a listing of the content every once in a while.
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dandy72 wrote: I'm the guy who buys drives in sets of 4
I don't: I don't want all the drives from the same batch (and preferably not from the same manufacturer) as I've noticed over the years that drives in a batch all tend to fail very close to each other. I had a whole room's worth of PCs fail over a two week period, and they all had the same batch HDDs. IIRC one survived, but I swapped it out anyway.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: I don't: I don't want all the drives from the same batch (and preferably not from the same manufacturer) as I've noticed over the years that drives in a batch all tend to fail very close to each other
Well...at least that provides you with some predictability then, no? 
Besides, the failure here has nothing to do with the drives I bought in a batch. This was a one-off sitting in its own enclosure.
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dandy72 wrote: Besides, the failure here has nothing to do with the drives I bought in a batch
So far...:FingersCrossed:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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The argument against buying drives from the same manufacturing batch seems to come from those who use a large quantity of them and use them in a RAID setup and/or have them running 24/7. In my case, I really have only one drive running all the time, and the two backup drives are only used for a few hours every week when things get synched, and on top of that the drive I keep offsite doesn't get used for a full month. And then, the spare is still sitting in its box and will remain there until one of the other drive fails. So, except for a grand total of one drive, they see very little use.
Given this, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not all that worried about having them all starting to fail at the same time. If history's any indication, all 4 drives in each set I've bought were still going strong by the time space became a problem and I moved to a new set (initially 2, then 4, and I'm now on my set of 6TB drives).
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I know that feeling! I started with a 1TB NAS , went to a 4TB RAID5, and now have a 16TB RAID 5, plus a bunch of 4TB USB externals for backups.
And I'll probably have to replace that with a bigger one next year 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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On the bright side, I now have enough spare multi-TB drives that I've started using them in a RAID-10 setup for my VM host.
I'm amazed that still doesn't even come close, in terms of performance, to a single SSD, but not all my VMs need that kind of speed.
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Download TestDisk it's free and will recover your files from drives windows does not like.
It's a DOS program with a horrible interface but oh man it has saved our behinds more than a couple of times.
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For the future. Do not buy drives from the same batch (close manufacture date), rather rotate them with skips of 6-12 month. Drives used in same environment have the same life span and will fail at the same time...
I also advise to use hardware RAID with 3 disk in it (at least) it will not only save backup time, but save offline time too.
Swap out drive at the defined point-in-time even not faulty...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Don't scrap it, scrub it, wipe-it, re-interleave it, etc.
Take it out of the case, and try it in something like this[^] (or in a spare slot in a PC, if you've got one).
Of the five external drives that have failed on me, three of them were the case, not the drive.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Take it out of the case
Although this is not the case here, it's still worth a reminder: A lot of USB enclosures nowadays will do their own on-the-fly encryption - the standard SATA drive gets hooked up to a small PCB that does the encryption, and the connector on the other end of the PCB is what provides the external power/USB interface. So if you take the drive out of the enclosure, the drive is unreadable.
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So just label pop it in the disc bay thingy with a label inscribed "Imperialist Targets", then set it within view of your PC or laptop camera, and the nice people in the government will decrypt it for you.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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dandy72 wrote: I'm the guy who buys drives in sets of 4...one live, one offline backup sitting next to the computer, another backup at the office (I swap drives once a month), and one more spare blank drive ready to go the moment one of the other ones fails. That's for my important stuff.
What do you have against using a RAID?
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm not anti-RAID, but I'm a firm believer that keeping duplicates of everything is a waste of time and space.
I keep everything personal and important in specific directories, that are backed up in a perhaps complicated, but easy to set up, pattern.
Storing multiple copies of an operating system and program files seems like a total waste, to me.
The files that are important to me will open on any operating system, and in any number of programs, so why dedicate 200x more space than they require to storing OS and {PF} stuff that is transient?
If I want to move my important files to a new machine, it takes a couple of minutes (and only a few seconds to add a back-up routine to the mesh of back-up routines that already exist).
Sorting out what to retain from a full system copy can take days.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: I'm not anti-RAID, but I'm a firm believer that keeping duplicates of everything is a waste of time and space.
I keep everything personal and important in specific directories, that are backed up in a perhaps complicated, but easy to set up, pattern.
Storing multiple copies of an operating system and program files seems like a total waste, to me.
You don't have to have a RAID for your system volume. You can always create a volume that's specific for storage that's backed by a RAID.
That being said, there is a valid use case for backing up the system volume, you'd like to recover in the event of a failure sooner than later. Some people would like to get back to work rather than go through the pain of reinstalling everything, and updating patches, etc. again. To each their own, but it's a valid use case.
Anyway, RAID was designed to handle what you're doing. If you have 4 drives laying around, you could always have one for the system and 3 for the storage as a RAID 5. All your installed OSes will still have access to the volume just so long as it's a hardware RAID you're using.
Mark_Wallace wrote: Sorting out what to retain from a full system copy can take days.
Guess that all depends on how you organize your files bro.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: To each their own, but it's a valid use case
Granted, but for me, installing a new system happens much more often than having to reinstall a previous system because of failure (i.e. the latter has never happened, in over thirty years of intensive computer usage), so storing a system via raid is a complete waste of everything.
That's what shadow copies and images are for, if you're really paranoid -- but just ensuring the safety of the comparatively few files that are actually of value to you is way more important (and leads to fewer compatibility problems).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Well yeah sure, but restoring from a shadow copy of a backup isn't as *pure* as the exact state before the crash that you'd get with RAID. Anyway, to each their own. If system files ain't no important to you, then don't back them up. Just don't tell MS, they may cry. I mean, at least backup notepad. It's such a useful app.
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm really glad we had this discussion, because it's reminded me to amend my registry-chunk-extractor script for my win tablet.
I'd have been severely cheesed off if the drive had failed, or something, and I'd been unable to restore my program settings.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Glad I could help, yay for CP.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: What do you have against using a RAID?
I'm not really after redundancy here, or looking at improving performance, so RAID doesn't offer me much in this context. I'm not going to make the mistake assuming that RAID == backup.
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dandy72 wrote: I'm not going to make the mistake assuming that RAID == backup
But neither does keeping a spare drive around in case one crashes. Again, tomato vs tomahto. But this problem has already been solved.
Jeremy Falcon
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