We’re entering multiple decades of people using hard drives to store data, along with the fact that HDs fail with lifespans in years. Yet data recovery places do very brisk business, tech help boards are filled with tales of woe from even business owners who had one copy of all their operating records. I’ve known people who realized their hard drive was failing but still didn’t purchase another to back up their data believing it would jinx it. I’ve known a guy that paid for hard drive recovery twice! The first time taught him nothing, except to blame everyone else for a hard drive failing.
If hard drives told you the exact day they would fail without error, there would still be brisk business in recovery.
I don’t think there’s anything special about hard drives. People are like that about everything. For example, my friend saw the tread on his car tires was wearing thin. He knew he needed new ties but waited until he had a flat to get them.
I have been there - except for the part about loosing data because I know that if your computer starts to act weird when doing disk-related activity, you should back up your data (not to mention that I occasionally back it up anyway).
I think the situation tells you something quirky about the computer industry, too. In principle, you should be able to go buy another drive and replace or back up your data. In practice, all you can do is buy something and launch yourself down some path that may end satisfactorily in a few minutes, or may have you spending two weeks prowling user support discussion boards, writing angry emails, and fighting to get your money back. I bet I have bought 30 computers and twice that many accessories so far, and I still have not the faintest clue how to predict which it is going to be.
I think people were more conscientious about backups in the days of floppy disks. As hard drives got bigger, it began to take too many floppies to back them up. None of my early computers had a mount for a second hard drive to be used for backup and there was very little mention of the need to do so.
I bought a tape drive but my hard drives outgrew that, and soom it was taking eight tapes and eighteen hours to do a backup. I looked for an updated solution and there was none. There weren’t many options back them for external drives either.
Even if the case would hold multiple drives, very few motherboards had RAID technology. You had to buy a separate card and they weren’t publicized. Eventually I bought a Western Digital Mirror drive, two 750GB drives side by side in one housing with a proprietary RAID system. When the first drive failed, I ordered a replacement the next day. It cost significantly more than a normal drive of that capacity for some reason, I suppose because they had to have matching firmware. It was all for naught, as the second drive failed later that night. Both drives came out of the same batch.
So I blame the computer and hard drive industries for pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. The savvy may know about the need for backups, but Mom doesn’t. I have several internal drives and an external mount that allows me to swap backup drives in and out. Backups are very slow over USB and I’m not as diligent about doing them as I should be. But I feel confident that I won’t be ruined if something happens. Totally crippled but not utterly destroyed.
I’ve been faithfully backing up my data ever since Apple started putting Time Machine right on the desktop and I realized that my Itunes data had become a significant part of my life. It even starts bugging you if you haven’t done a backup in 10 days or more.
Windows has a similar feature but if you’ve got multiple drives (I have four) it can be expensive to attach external drives to all of them. My case doesn’t allow for 8 internals, and depending on how busy I’ve been, backups run anywhere from two hours to fifteen for each drive. It’s difficult for me to create a backup schedule.
The standalone mount I use is cheap and allows me to swap out backup disks but my machine is USB 1.0 and it takes forever to pass data back and forth. I eagerly look forward to having the capital to build a new machine with updated hardware and more internal capacity.
Well, it’s kinda like the guy I used to know who insisted that since he had put some piece of his ‘art’ on the internet, it would be immortal and be out there forever. I had to point out that it would only be there as long as the server and website cared to maintain it. People want to think, despite all evidence and experience, that things are eternal.
When I did computer support, like clockwork, twice a year at college finals time, I could count on at least one angry, crying phone call from a college student who had everything in their life on their laptop without a single existing copy of it anywhere else. And of course, they’re calling because the drive crashed. :rolleyes:
I can’t blame the industry. Drives have expected lifespans. It isn’t a firm, fixed number any more than it is for any other industry, from your garden hose to the space shuttle. You use it differently in different envionments and subject to different conditions than other people, there are subtle variations in the materials of the parts and manufacture, and shit just happens.
Three 1TB drives and 120GB for the operating system and programs. I have several extensive databases (mostly music-related) and about a terabyte of MP3s but there’s about 750GB of free space spread across the drives.