Hard Disk Crash Survival Kit

[Guest]

Millions of drives crash every year. Family photos, personal diaries, and home videos are lost forever—or are they? Here’s what you can do before and after disks go bad.

Hard Disk Crash Survival Kit : Read more

 

[Guest]

FYI, many external HDDs are coming with built-in disk encryption, which would make the "recovery facilities" impotent at restoring your lost data. If your drive(s) has this "feature," you may have to ensure your data is recoverable if the case/drive has issues. (yes, some solutions, WD has one, requires the external drive enclosure to read the encrypted data from the HDD)

 

[longshotthe1st]

Please do something about the spam or I am outta here, as well as others I'm sure.

 

[Scanlia]

Yeah, there are spammers everywhere and the +1/-1 system doesn't seem to be working... DO SOMETHING TOM!!!

 

[syrinxx]

I can't believe there is no mention of Aconis True Image.

 

[rdhood]

This is an extremely simplistic article.

There are *many* partition/disk imaging packages available, often for free (Acronis, Paragon and Easeus come to mind, they offer old additions for free on a regular basis), and 1TB drives are now $60! You can regularly back up your entire drive to a bootable hard disk. Have a drive crash? Swap disks and boot. Downtime is about one minute.



If you have two computers, it is a good idea to back up data from one system to another.

When 1TB drives are $60, there is no good reason not to have a full image backup.

 

[ctmk]

For desktops, What about software disk mirroring in Windows 7?

It "seems reliable" on my case. even i unplug one of the drive and plug it in another Windows XP machine and the Dynamic Disk can still be recognized and mounted. Performance were good and no extra hardware required.

 

[Darkk]

I personally like CrashPlan as it offers multiple ways of backing up your data to including offsite either for free (buddy) or for a fee at the data center.

I use the native disk image backup in Windows 7 which is set to backup at least once a week. CrashPlan is always backing up every 15 minutes of any file changes. Very handy to recover a file that have been accidently overwritten.

 

[Guest]

Any linux live cd!

A friends mac book pro died before xmas and Apple couldn't recover the data (their recommendation was new hdd - unit was still under warranty).

Booted from Linux mint and recovered about 95% of his work and family files (other 5% were on broken part of disk). I'm no expert but it was pretty easy to do and after some file permission issues were sorted was as simple as drag and drop the files to a usb drive

 

[stokesj75]

I would have like to seen applications like photorec and testdisk (both Linux applications) covered in this article . These allow for recovering from minor hard drive corruption or crash. as long as it is just bad blocks/sectors, missing partitions , deleted files and folders.

 

[LuckyDucky7]

Windows Live SkyDrive.

That is all.

 

[ProDigit10]

buh!
I thought finally a clever soul invented a casing where you just need to drop in the hd cylinder and it'd recognize it, and restore the drive on another drive...

I guess that's what manufacturers don't want to do, when they can get upto a few thousands of bucks for it!
Technically it should be a matter of taking out the cylinder/platters, and installing them in a similar drive,then copying the data to another drive.

In other words, the price of the harddrive, + shipping + 2 hours of work (since the time of copy usually noone needs to attend the drive). In other words, a drive for $100, + $25 shipping and handling, and $50 max for copying the data = $175 for recovery!

$500-$3500 is just absurd. They invest in dust free rooms for the hd, but in real fact, the hd has a hole in it the size of a screw that could absorb dust.
For the average joe signing a contract that the company can not be sued when no data could be extracted, that has all his fav movs downloaded on the drive, $175 is a much more feasible fee!

 

[LordConrad]

I hope you tried Spinrite before calling CBL. If not then you probably wasted some hard earned cash. Spinrite won't fix everything, but it's definitely worth trying before paying a company like CBL.

 

[bobwya]

Ok so I'd like:
* 1x Christan Audigier BIKINI JACKET
* 1x gstar coogi evisu true jeans
I hav US dollar is that god?

Heh, heh - can't beat 'um then join them.

BTW I just thought of a good idea for a new THG article:
How CAPTCHA works!!

 

[Guest]

I can't believe there is no mention of Steve Gibson's SpinRite! www.grc.com.

Peter G

 

[Guest]

+1 for Testdisk

Avery Y.

 

[bobwya]

[citation][nom]pgowdy[/nom]I can't believe there is no mention of Steve Gibson's SpinRite! www.grc.com. Peter G[/citation]

Yeh just wish he'd work on updating it so it worked with more host controllers!! I gather it can't boot on a Linux kernel because it doesn't get direct access to harddisks... Maybe he could get the technology licensed to get Spinrite added into some of these new fancy EFI BIOS's!!

 

[hardcore_gamer]

RAID1

 

[Guest]

I guess no one ever heard of just burning the information to a DVD. As soon as i have around a DVD's worth of a single type of information i burn it. The only things i worry about are the small files, things like resumes and my program code, which i only back up when i reformat, which happens every 3 months on average.... Anyways i ordered a new drive and it should be here any day now, since i noticed that my 5 year old drive is making a horrible knocking sound and is likely on the brink, it sounds like an old car engine before it dies...

 

[bobwya]

[citation][nom]comp enthuisist[/nom]I guess no one ever heard of just burning the information to a DVD. As soon as i have around a DVD's worth of a single type of information i burn it.[/citation]

Say you happened to be doing things that you shouldn't be... You wouldn't try and backup a 1Tb+ on DVD media - would you? There starts to become issues of storage space. Never mind that you might by a dodgy batch of DVD's (with a new dye) and get a pile of coaster backups. Also all recordable DVD dye layers gradually destabilise over time - the lifespan of 50 years originally postulated for the media is grossly inaccurate...

Also ever tried to backup a full HD movie to a DVD... Uh duh - it doesn't fit..

I've tried bulk DVD backups and it's a pain in the preferables...