Opinion on hard drive failure and the human condition.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t get it. All the time you hear about hard drives going bad, you hear about people having the different ways of backing up stuff.

Then here comes the thread about people buying huge hard drives and when they die, (big surprise), they have to have that data because it is no were else.

I don’t get it. Why do they think that the 300 GIG to 1 “T” hard drive in an external enclosure will never fail when they have had regular hard drives fail or they have seen all the horror stories on places like the SDMB?

It does not seem to occur to these people that their huge drive needs a back up if they can’t afford to lose that information.

DUH BRT people, have a back up. Now I don’t / can’t afford huge new drives but I find 20 - 40 GIG 7200 drives just laying around for free to $10 or some such. I have drawers of IDE drives and am working on a drawer for SATA.

Now, I know people who say they will not pay a dine for a computer with an “A” drive or an IDE connection or 2. But here those oh so savvy computer users are with 400 GIG of information needing an expensive and time consuming and maybe ‘never going to get it back’ distance away at the most importune time.

They have all these complicated plans that never seem to work.

But no way in blazes will they clone a drive once a week and keep it in a drawer. No sir, that is not an acceptable geek thing to do. Real computer people will not do that.

I think they are crazy. I am not a geek, I am not rich and can’t buy supper nice equipment but I sure can CMA when it comes to data with an easey and cheap way of replacing hard ware with all the data right there when Mr. Murphy comes a calling.

Time after time I see it posted on here and other places but no one seems to pay any attention to those posts and then their 4 P’s gets them to crying for help. (Piss Poor Prior Planning)

There are even major business that operate like that.

Am I expecting too much from people? DUH BRT. I guess I am.

I guess a lot of fancy software on an hard drive is great even when it won’t turn anymore.

My opinion is that no one really learns from others mistakes. Kinda sad IMO.

2

What’s BRT? Board of Revision of Taxes? Bus Rapid Transit? Bingo! Ring Time? Be Right There?

3

Big Red Truck

4

Your post makes slightly less sense now.

5

There are two types of people in this world - those who backup everything important, and those who have never had a hard drive crash.

My REALLY important stuff I always keep saved to all 3 drives in my computer, and my semi-important stuff at least gets a DVD backup now and then.

6

This same type of thing can be applied to almost any type of behavior. I’m sure you fall into some category yourself.
-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about these people who speed in their vehicles all the time and then when they get a ticket (big surprise!) they pay big fines and their insurance rates go up. Why can’t they slow down? DUR

-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about these people who weigh 300 pounds and eat all day and then when they get a heart disease/hypertension/diabetes (big surprise!) they have to take medication and pay a lot more for their medical bills. Why can’t they go on a diet and exercise? DUR

-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about these people who bring children into the world they can’t afford to care for properly and then the economy gets bad and they need help (big surprise!) they take taxpayer dollars to survive. Why can’t they stop having kids? DUR

-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about these people who have one too many drinks and drive and then get a DUI (big surprise!) they pay big fines, lose their insurance and possibly go to jail. Why can’t they just call a cab? DUR

-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about these people who don’t practice gun safety and then when somebody gets accidentally shot (big surprise!) they find themselves responsible for someone’s injury or death. Why can’t they show respect to the deadliness of firearms and take care? DUR

-I don’t get it. All the time you hear about irresponsible people who turn in library books late or not at all then when they need something like a transcript (big surprise!) they have to have their fathers go and pay their debt for them so they can get what they need. Why can’t they be responsible for the property they borrow from others? DUR
I could go on, but I imagine you get what I’m saying. We’re all human and make mistakes, some are deadly and some just cost us money and a lot of hassle. Glass houses, stones… all that.

Sleeps With Butterflies, recent computer operator who had a 250GB hard drive fail, but is willing to pay the money for data recovery and accept her stupidity for some of the items she lost because she didn’t back up yet this month

7

Man if you don’t have a dual mirrored SATA array dumping to DVD with an off-site on-line backup in case of fire, you’re really going to regret when your town gets firebombed by the Kazakh Navy.

8

I guess you are too young to remember that joke. It was quite the thing back before … well sometime… It …means …something …that …should …be …real …obvious.
:dubious:

9

Perzactly… :smiley:

10

Thanks for remembering some of my posts. :smiley:

You are correct. Also is that not about ½ of what is posted on the SDMB? I’m just trying to fit in… ::: sigh ::: Poor me … Where is all that famous SDMB compassion? snerk

11

I’ve never had a hard drive fail in ~20 years of heavy computer use. I have no idea what I’d do if mine did - be annoyed, most likely - but it’s something that just happens to other people, like Xbox RROD’s or migraine headaches.

12

I think maybe I do get it.

Much of the nature of work on a PC is to keep plugging away on writing a program, or playing a game, or researching a topic, or calculating a result, and gradually getting to the end in an incremental and thought provoking cycle back and forth between human and machine.

Backup situations don’t fit this. Regarding backups, it is critically important to do a certain thing moments before you get a certain bit of feedback, but it is not important at all to do it before that time. There’s no incremental cycle. Backups do not matter one teeny tiny little bit, until it just became too late to do them.

The only workaround I see is to identify as a project the creation of some kind of backup system or habit, and to consider victory as achieving some level of proficiency at it based on your predictions of possible problems. We hear sob stories from people who have not done this, is all.

13

I think this is pretty much where it comes from. The one time I did have a hard drive problem I was able to recover the data myself using a second drive (OS was borked). There’s a few things I should probably back up, but most of my files are neither critical nor irreplaceable. I’ve lost a fair bit of stuff over the years simply because I didn’t transfer it from machine to machine and I don’t give a rats ass about it. I worry more about having to reinstall stuff than I do losing data.

I can think of two files that I would be mad about losing, and a third set that’s replaceable but not easily so. Aside from those, my computer could go RAM chips up tomorrow and I wouldn’t care a bit.

14

I back up to DVD and a fireproof safe because I’ve had computers fail and I look over at my nice new 1T drive with a slight unease as if its getting ready to stab me in the back as soon as I hit 800 gigs.

Thing is I only back up the real important stuff.

Music: lost many of the CDs and I don’t like having binders of some 200 albums, I burn to DVD as data and just redo the whole thing every six months at least.

Photos: I’m an amateur photographer (obligatory shameless self promotion link) and I take at least a couple hundred pictures a week. For a while I’d back up all my photos to DVD and keep them on the computer (sorted by date). Now, though, its been long enough (a year plus) that most of my older photos will not be needed on a day to day basis. All pictures sorted by date uploaded that are over a year old are not only uploaded but are deleted from my computer. 5 megs a piece times several hundred and I’d be out of a drive in short order.

And that’s as best I can do, I guess.

I’m not going to go hunting around for all the random odds and ends on the drive so I categorize the important stuff and back it up in a safe location. Deleting it from the drive when it will most likely serve little to no use for the foreseeable future but still is important enough to keep.