Backup for Backups

Last year after my holiday, my hard drive decided not to boot up after having a 3 week rest. Luckily after some not so subtle slapping around, it started to spin again, and I haven’t turned the PC off since.

After that experience, I decided that it was worth investing some money into a backup solution. I chose a proprietary Maxtor OneTouch III 1TB Drive, which I put into a Raid 1 configuration. This way, there’s two copies of whatever I copy onto it – in case one of those drives dies.


Bought for $899, now they’re only $499. Fuckers.

Everything works well in theory, but as they say – the proof is in the pudding.

Yesterday, I was browsing through some of my photos (photos I took myself, not porn) and I started to notice there were directories.. empty ones. That should have had lots of pictures in them.

I shut the computer down, and connected the Maxtor to my other computer. It didn’t even detect it! I moved it back to the first PC. Missing too!

I wondered if I could just pull out the drives and see which one was still working.. No. Damn – a Warranty Sticker over the screw.

Back to the 2nd pc again, and after a dozen or so reboots and power cycles, cable wiggles, and a few mild thumps, it detected. Whew! A nice message popped up from the Maxtor software to inform me that the drive mirroring was now disabled as one of the drives had suffered hardware failure, and that I should send the drive back to Maxtor for replacement. No mention of how to save my stuff.

So I moved my data as quickly as possible to various hard drives just incase it decided to stop working permanently. It’s now spread across 5 different drives, but it’s.. safe(ish).

I quick formatted the remaining (working) partition on the Maxtor, then tried to format it normally – it didn’t want to do that bit. Boxed it up, got an RA number, and back it goes for replacement today.

This whole process has enlightened me with a couple of shortcomings in my choice of backup hardware.

IF the circuit board had fried itself, but the drives themselves were still good, how would I get my data? Easy choice if it was out of warranty – rip the bitch apart, but as it’s still within warranty I obviously want it fixed. Free.

I’m now thinking of getting a RAID 1 NAS box that I can put my own drives into, which will overcome these issues. Rebuild on the fly, and all that shit.

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26.Nov.07 Bitching, Web / Programming Comments (2)