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A warning about storage!

S

SecretSquirrel

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 21, 2013
127
195
U.K.
Wasn’t sure which forum to put this in but it applies to everyone really.

As I mentioned in another post, had some trouble recently reading and retrieving files which I’d burned to DVD-R 15 years ago. Thankfully, my trusty old FireWire burner came to the rescue but it reminded me that even physical media degrade over time.

I also have FireWire HDD which I installed a new HDD in probably 10 years ago and which was the repository for all my PPC downloads and software over 8 years until I primarily moved over to Intel. In light of my experience with the DVDs, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s always worked although the last time I used it would’ve been probably 2020. Since then it’s been sat in a sealed container in a cool dry garage undisturbed.

As you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t work. I’ve pulled it out of the enclosure and tested it in a dock and… nothing. The drive spins up, clicks 3 times and that’s it. It doesn’t register in disk utility or anywhere else.

Now don’t get me wrong, this drive was brand new 10 years ago but wasn’t installed in anything else and would’ve had run-time less than 100 hrs over those 12 years. It was plugged in, used and then unplugged and stored in a dry, cool, clean environment. Maybe I should have used it more…

Anyway, if I’m staying with PPC for a while longer, I’ll have to start all over again. Thank goodness for Macintosh Garden and the other resources like this one which have been created!

Thank you all 😊
 
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SecretSquirrel said:
Wasn’t sure which forum to put this in but it applies to everyone really.

As I mentioned in another post, had some trouble recently reading and retrieving files which I’d burned to DVD-R 15 years ago. Thankfully, my trusty old FireWire burner came to the rescue but it reminded me that even physical media degrade over time.

I also have FireWire HDD which I installed a new HDD in probably 10 years ago and which was the repository for all my PPC downloads and software over 8 years until I primarily moved over to Intel. In light of my experience with the DVDs, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s always worked although the last time I used it would’ve been probably 2020. Since then it’s been sat in a sealed container in a cool dry garage undisturbed.

As you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t work. I’ve pulled it out of the enclosure and tested it in a dock and… nothing. The drive spins up, clicks 3 times and that’s it. It doesn’t register in disk utility or anywhere else.

Now don’t get me wrong, this drive was brand new 10 years ago but wasn’t installed in anything else and would’ve had run-time less than 100 hrs over those 12 years. It was plugged in, used and then unplugged and stored in a dry, cool, clean environment. Maybe I should have used it more…

Anyway, if I’m staying with PPC for a while longer, I’ll have to start all over again. Thank goodness for Macintosh Garden and the other resources like this one which have been created!

Thank you all 😊
Click to expand...
A long time ago I had a TiBook 400. At that time it was the only Mac I owned and since it was PowerPC, I was PowerPC by default. This would have been two or three years before I ever registered on these forums.

The hard drive died at some point and I had no backups. I was able to leverage the license work had with Alsoft for DiskWarrior and their customer support not only paid for shipping of my laptop drive and a spare hard drive to Texas and back, they recovered all my data.

At that point I got serious about backups. While I do on occasion burn discs of the stuff I've downloaded, there is no media save a HD or SSD that could store in one volume all the stuff I have sitting on my Download/Burn drive. So, that's the only media I can rely on for that as I'm not interested in sitting there burning hundreds of DVDs.

So, its the one drive that doesn't get backed up. I've accepted that I could lose it all - although the majority of it could just be downloaded again (if I could still find it).

But backups of my primary drive is what matters to me most and I have a system that gives me Daily and Weekly backups. The Weekly backups are stored as disk images on Dropbox (I have a 4.1TB plan with them). So, unless (God forbid) Dropbox fails, a digital disk image is stored up there for as long as I continue giving them money.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
I have a feeling (most) home users only get serious about backups after experiencing a situation where they wished they had one but didn’t :) It was like this for my dad and me.
Click to expand...

It was like that for me as well. Only through facing the danger of data loss and then scrambling for recovery options and possibilities did I learn the hard way that prevention is so much less stressful than cure. :)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
I have a feeling (most) home users only get serious about backups after experiencing a situation where they wished they had one but didn’t :) It was like this for my dad and me.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and for me it was the second time around (or third, depending on how you look at things).

I had a PC that was stolen the first night my wife and I moved in to a duplex in 1997. No backups, so I lost a series of Works/Word/Txt/PM/QXP files that were important to me. It was so depressing that I didn't actually seriously try recreating those things until about 2001-2002. Being able to recover some stuff off floppies and ZIP disks that I'd used to transfer those files to my mom's Mac so I could print helped a bit.

But in 2003 I had my PC die on me. All my data was on a drive that was using an overlay to access the entire capacity of the drive. Without another PC to install the software for the overlay and a method to connect the drive - I lost all the data. On top of that, my junky ZIP 250 USB drive failed and ate the NEW files that I'd recreated from faulty memory! Still no backups here.

So more recreating and then the TiBook drive fails! This was before Dropbox too. So, I guess, three times it took for me to get serious. But Dropbox was also a boon. When it came along I jumped on it! It meant I could have these files on a drive that was automatically synced in the Cloud. They've been there ever since and now I make backups of entire HDs AND my Dropbox folder to Dropbox itself.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
It was like that for me as well. Only through facing the danger of data loss and then scrambling for recovery options and possibilities did I learn the hard way that prevention is so much less stressful than cure. :)
Click to expand...
This is one of the reasons that I do not place all my eggs in one basket when it comes to my iPhone. In the iPhone forum here lots of people like to depend on iCloud for everything, but I'm using multiple protocols and services and it means I keep all my stuff without having to depend on any one (Apple) company.

Had to restore my 11PM data to a replacement in May. iCloud didn't have all my photos - but I did, because both Google Photos and Dropbox combined had them all (downloaded by me at various points to my hard drive). Simple matter of dumping them all in to the Photos app and having my iPhone eliminate duplicates. I'm okay with duplicates though when restoring. I'd rather have multiple copies of everything than NONE.
 
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I've got basically a Macintosh and Windows repository on my server. Storage is so cheap now. I keep disk images of those installers and a range of versions on my server. Along with backup drives.

Although my main reason wasn't because of degradation of the original media. I was thinking more about installation speed after a fresh install and how optical drives seem to fail so often. When CD drives cost $500-$600, they really held up. When they became a commodity and DVD drives dropped under $100. They did not hold up.
 
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Apple used to sell re-branded Mitsui DVD-Rs. They are amazing archival-quality discs. I have discs that were burned in 2003 that still work without any issues. When Apple discontinued them I used my employee discount to buy a case of them for ~$0.10 a piece. You can still find them on eBay—just search for "Apple DVD-R." You can usually find them for less than $2.00 a disc shipped.

↓↓↓ NOT MY LISTING ↓↓↓

www.ebay.com

Brand New Apple DVD-R 5 Pack 8x Speed M9472G/A 718908687499 | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Brand New Apple DVD-R 5 Pack 8x Speed M9472G/A at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com

IMG_3810.jpg
 
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I keep all my stuff on a ZFS based NAS (TrueNAS). Two pools, 4 x 4TB in RAIDZ1, so I can lose one disk and be okay. And another pool of 2 x 12TB in a mirror. It’s got all sorts of crap on it, Windows stuff too and it runs Plex. Best decision I ever made though, makes working on old Macs a lot easier as long it has an Ethernet port.

Even OS 9 can access the server. I also have a 2009 Mac Mini on snowleopard server with a 2TB drive that is a time machine backup for Leopars Macs, and serves a netboot of Mac OS X 10.2-10.6; both full installs and installers. If I get a “new” PowerPC Mac I can just plug it into the network and start it up holding N and it boots into a clean OS X ready to install.

I used to use FW disks all the time like most people in this forum, and I still have my 750GB FW drive that has Leopard and Tiger on it, and lots of other apps and utilities. But for most part it doesn’t get used much anymore and everything is done over the network. GigE is faster than FW most the time, especially if it’s a Mac with only FW400.
 
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Project Alice said:
and serves a netboot of Mac OS X 10.2-10.6; both full installs and installers.
Click to expand...
I remember watching some time ago an video from HrutkayMods (I don't remember the exact video) where he does that, I find it interesting to have a NetBoot/NetInstall server (#1, #2) but having a heavily specific dedicated machine to do that doesn't suits me right now. But I found it yesterday some replacement that will require more time/research (#1, #2) to proper apply it to my Raspberry Server, but I will use it beyond only Macs, to my X86 machines as well.

Thanks for reminding of this idea.
 
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belvdr said:
I'm glad I remembered that from 20 years ago! I'm lucky to recall what I ate for dinner last night. 😂
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There is the inverse trick too, which I've used on drives with stuck heads. You put the drive in the freezer for several hours (in a freezer bag to protect against moisture). The cold causes the metal to contract, which frees the heads. You've only got one shot though once you power the drive up. Once you disconnect power after getting your data off, it's dead. Subsequent refreezings don't work.
 
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