A power surge hit our house over the weekend. It took out two kitchen appliances, the cooker and the dishwasher, and, more importantly because of the implications, two external hard drives that were plugged in at the time. The Macs are safe, as are most of the external drives, but two are fried and gone for good.
I haven’t lost any data because I keep copies of all the drives. Hard drives are so cheap that it’s easy to buy them in pairs. And all the time they are unplugged sitting on a shelf the data is pretty safe. The threat level goes up when they are plugged in, susceptible to all sorts of external electrical mischief.
The terrible irony is that back up drives are at their most exposed when they are doing there job, when they are hooked up and receiving data from the source being backed up. The two drives that blew only did so because they were in use at the time.
But, if those drives had been in the middle of being backed up onto their respective pairs I could have lost a lot of important data. Personal things, 800 gigabytes of photographs. The sort of stuff that would have genuinely hurt if it had been zapped.
CDs and DVDs are hit and miss. They can rot and besides, backing up any reasonable amount of data, by today’s standards, takes an age. Online backup seems like a good idea but uploading 800 gigabytes of photographs is never going to be a walk in the park.
I’ve ordered a backup power supply with built in surge protection and I have my eye on a Blu Ray burner that should keep my backup paranoia at bay for at least a few weeks. Or until the next time something unexpected happens that takes my virtual valuables close to the edge of a virtual cliff.
Maybe I’m expecting too much, maybe I should just accept that fact that the digital door swings both ways and that it’s just as easy to lose data as it is to file it away in the first place.
So what’s the solution? Can any backup system really offer bullet proof protection?
if you ever decide to back up online, this place offers 1TB for free http://www.oosah.com/
only media, no files, but its a good spot for photos.
hello,
here in france you can buy for few euro a piece of hardware you plug in the wall and you plug the modem and all the rest as computers………..in that piece of hardware and if the the thunder is coming and you are so lucky to get one of those hit then that cut the line before it hits the modem, comp………. and it is less then ten euro.
greatings
Wangjel
I doubt they are unrecoverable.
What filesystem are you using? I’m using HFS+ and that is supposed to have some protection for outages.. I have had numerous outages, even in the midst of writing to an external HD and never had it fried..
http://images.apple.com/ca/fr/server/documentation/pdf/L31756A_FileJournal_TB_f.pdf
Do the indestructible back-up method. As you download the pictures, whack ‘em on a DVD.
We have been installing in the electric system a protection against electric troubles (if the thunder is coming and the house get one good hit the electric protection cut straight), all the files saved on all the computers (so we have complete copies and all the comp never go wrong in the same time and easier to work if everything is everywhere), and important pieces on memocards (client files straight saved on memory cards, we don’t use external harddisks)……..we never lost anything.
Lucky…….we don’t know too much about trouble
There is no backup-system that works really 100 % of the time. Librarians today warn that there will be a gigantic problem once all the books are digitized and you will have to different data carriers every once in xx years because of withering backup media…