A couple of months ago, I bought a maxtor 500gb external hard drive. It worked great at first, but after two months the drive failed. Are there other personal, local, backup solutions out there?
Thanks
Ficer67
A couple of months ago, I bought a maxtor 500gb external hard drive. It worked great at first, but after two months the drive failed. Are there other personal, local, backup solutions out there?
Thanks
Ficer67
Well, I’m sure there are volumes to be said on the whole topic. One thing that people (more often businesses) do is something called a RAID array. it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are different configurations, but the simplest is where you just have two disks holding all the same info, always updated at the same time. It’s a way to increase the reliability, since both would rarely fail at the same time, though you could always lose both at once due to lighting or a fire. I think you need special software for it.
There are tape machines. I don’t know how much they cost, there’s an initial cost but then I think tapes are cheaper per GB than disks. You could store tapes in a safe or something.
The idea I’ve had is to get an external hard drive enclosure. They’re pretty cheap. You can do that, and buy an internal drive unit and put it in. I was thinking of getting one and then having one drive just for backup, that I would take out of the enclosure and keep in a fire safe.
I backup critical files to two sets of drives: a 1-TB RAID5 array and to any of a number of Western Digital 500GB hard drives. To be honest, the RAID5 array doesn’t really afford me too many advantages over simply mirroring my extrernal hard drives. My RAID5 is also slow as all hell. I think in total, I have around 3.5 TB of storage.
I also have a good power conditioner/surge protector in place and I unplug my external hard drives in the case of any storms. Proper backup procedure would also having you backup off-site, either across a server or onto a physical medium of some sort (DVDs, Blu-Ray, etc.)
Take a look at mozy.com. You can backup two gigabytes or less for free and I think it’s only five bucks for more than that.
I use Mozy for the My Documents folder on my computer (about a gigabyte) so that it gets backed up every day, automatically, regularly and offsite, and backup the other stuff on my computer on several external drives, one of which I store offsite (but then I only do these backups weekly).
RAID should not be confused with a backup solution. Your data may be protected by a mirror or stripe drive, but in no way is it backed up. There are a lot of reasons for using RAID, but this isn’t one of them. Working in the computer industry, it’s frustrating how many people feel no need to do backups because their drives are in a RAID setup.
To the OP, I researched this same thing for my own home PCs just recently. I ended up with an external drive, similar to what you need to replace. How about trying another one? It seems that the quality of hard drives is pretty cyclical. From what I’ve seen, Maxtor has been at a low point for some time. Hopefully that will change as I believe they were purchased by Seagate. In the mean time, go with a different brand.
As an addendum to the previous post, I have dealt with many failed Maxtor and Western Digital drives, I have had 2 IBM drives fail on me. The only drives I have had that have never had a problem are Seagate’s. They only ever get retired, or passed on, when their capacity is insufficient for current requirements.
Just get another external HDD.
BTW your failed drive should still be covered under warranty, so you should be able to get a replacement from Maxtor or the shop.
Unless you’ve got anything interesting on it, of course, because they’ll want you to send it back so they can examine it.
Well I am glad someone mentioned the warranty. It is in fact under warranty, and I will be getting a replacement soon. The warranty issue has been bubbling around the back of my mind for a few days.
Thanks for all of the great suggesstions & be typing at you again soon
Ficer67
Years ago when I worked for Diners Club, we had an on-line system that needed constant backup. We had a Data General front end to the main computer system that constantly backed up all incoming and outgoing data to two identical disk drives. Then, at night all the daily transactions were backed up to two tape drives. We always had good backup data. Two drives is the answer to not losing important data.
RAID is not a backup solution. RAID is a fault tolerance solution that keeps you running in the event of disk hardware failure. It does absolutely nothing to prevent users or programs for deleting or corrupting data, which are more likely causes of data loss.