www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Geek Hall A warning Hard disk failure

having had one in the past I have been pretty careful about backing up ever since .

I actually have 2 external drives that I use - one portable and one a desktop and both are used most days - certainly one back up is always done.

It's paid off.

I was online first thing this morning , booted up and got my email in and then heard a little clicking and instantly my MacBook froze.

Had to power off and once I had let it settle down , powered up again and got the dreaded grey screen with a folder and a question mark on it. Yup -- hard drive failure

New hard drive is awaited and it should be back online by the weekend .

Now everything was normal and yet 5 mins later it failed.

MORAL - make sure you do back up - this would have been a real disaster if I was not regularly doing just that.

I have a FreeAgent external drive that came with its own software. It automatically backs up everything on the hard disk throughout the day. Better safe than sorry!

Right now, I am scoping out specs on another external Hard Drive just for back ups and storage. I just found a Western Digital MyBook Desktop 1TB external drive for $143 on amazon that probably will be the one I get. It will supplement my other external drives that are used primarily in the field.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+

The main array on my main machine is a set of 3x1.5TB drives in a zfs array. The machine is running FreeBSD so that it can use zfs, which solves some of the problems of regular raid. If any of those three drives fail, they can be replaced without data loss.

I additionally have another 1.5Tb boot drive of the same type, which could substitute for one of the three. In normal use, key files get backed up to it. There is also another of teh same drive in an external housing to connect to the main array and synchronize (with a second of these planned, so that one can be offsite, and that they can alternate).

Once I figure it out, the laptops (4, I think) will synchronize to the main machine, and be included in its backup.

And I'm not sure I've done enough--maybe I should have had 4 rather than 3 in that array, so that 2 instead of 1 could fail . . .

hawk