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Keeping data safe? Hard drives keep failing!

W

whit8725

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 21, 2010
16
0
Hi there,

I've managed to lose a succession of important data over the years through hard drive failures. I once lost 300 gigs of music because of a nasty Maxtor Hard drive. Recently I've managed to lose some work related data when my Seagate Barracuda hard drive failed.

I'm getting pretty damn sick of this. Is there a sure fire method that will keep my data safe for an extended period of time? I'm tried burning cds and dvds, they also fail over time. Infact I have discs burnt way back in 2003 that no longer work.

I understand that online storage places also just use regular hard drives? So whats stopping them failing and me losing data again?
 
There is nothing that is 100% fail-proof. In general, you should always have more then one copy, if you do that the chances of both failing at the same time don't seem very high, considering it's not just two partitions.
 
You could use archival CD and DVD's
the gold ones you burn at 1X
i have a few over 10 years old and they are still solid.
are supposed to be good for 100 years.

Cloud Storage is also another possibility if you have a lot of data.
 
I use Time Machine with my iMac. I figure the chances of my the iMac's harddrive and the external harddrive going bad at the same time are pretty slim.
 
Thanks for the replies. I've just googled up Archival CDs. There is one particular golden CD that caught my eye. 300 years guaranteed lifetime. They aren't exactly cheap but I think I shall have to invest in a few for my data.
 
whit8725 said:
Is there a sure fire method that will keep my data safe for an extended period of time?
Click to expand...

There's no point having everything backed up to CD when your house burns down - you'll lose the computer and the backups. Additionally, as you've discovered, writable CD's fail.

Try www.backblaze.com; cheap, encrypted, can access your files from anywhere, plays very nicely with Macs. But the killer feature is that it's always on, always watching. The second you create a new document, import a photo from your camera etc it immediately backs it up. Invaluable, even if only for those times you accidentally delete something.

whit8725 said:
I understand that online storage places also just use regular hard drives? So whats stopping them failing and me losing data again?
Click to expand...

They have massive redundancy; think of them like a Drobo. The data is mirrored across a number of drives which are monitored. When one fails, another takes over for it.

AppleMatt
 
The only surefire way to backup your data is offline storage. Strangely, I've had the hard drive fail on every single Apple computer I've owned. That's a PowerBook, a MacBook, and an iMac.

I keep triplicate backups, and when I go back to Canada each year, I make a backup there as well. So far one of my externals has died.
 
whit8725 said:
Hi there,


I'm getting pretty damn sick of this. Is there a sure fire method that will keep my data safe for an extended period of time? I'm tried burning cds and dvds, they also fail over time. Infact I have discs burnt way back in 2003 that no longer work.

I understand that online storage places also just use regular hard drives? So whats stopping them failing and me losing data again?
Click to expand...

First of all, just keep this in mind: Data that is only backed up in one place isn't backed up. All hard drives will fail. It's just a matter of when, not if. DVDs aren't an option, either. When CDs and DVDs first came onto the scene, there were promises they would last "decades", which has proven false.

Truthfully, you need multiple backups, and one of the backups needs to be offsite. This can either be through one of the online services like Carbonite, Mozy, etc, or something as simple as an external HD that you take to the office, friend/relatives house, etc. Keep one external HD at home, and take another offsite.

As for the online services: I have one word for you: SAN, or Storage Area Network. This is different from a NAS, which is just some hard drives on a network. A SAN is designed for redundancy. At one job where I was a SAN administrator, we had 4 shelves of 14 hard drives, which was mirrored to an identical array. All of that was then backed up to a different SAN. We then backed THAT up to tapes, which were taken off-site. We once lost 3 hard drives in one day, and our users never noticed a thing. That is what a good backup service should be doing.
 
You can do three of these things at the same time for some good data redundancy

-RAID 1 - for quick complete recovery when one hard drive fails
-Time Machine - when your RAID array screws up
-Offsite - could be that you have another external hard drive and you keep it at your friend's house when you're not backing up or using an online backup service or you can do both!
 
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