Disaster!

[Randazzo]

Hard drive failure. Loud, rapid clicking followed by a pop. Total loss. No backup. All original blender models lost. Three instances of KSP 0.90 lost, along with my personal repo of 0.90 mod zips. The world has gotten darker tonight.

Not to mention the actual important information lost. Should've backed it up.

[WinkAllKerb'']

wait for the morning when thing are dark it work most the time to grab some light ... notice it could be longer near the pole north or south ; )

[Camacha]

Hard drive failure. Loud, rapid clicking followed by a pop. Total loss. No backup. All original blender models lost. Three instances of KSP 0.90 lost, along with my personal repo of 0.90 mod zips. The world has gotten darker tonight.

Not to mention the actual important information lost. Should've backed it up.

You only realize the importance of what you have when you lose it. Backups are so very easy to forget or neglect, yet sooner or later we all mourn the pictures and works lost.

[WinkAllKerb'']

boot sector fail are annoyin' when they occur true true. especially for photo and that kind of numeric and personal kind of record things nowdays ; ) it's like losing you own memory for later on in some kind a fire in the old paper days. true true

Edited June 27, 2015 by WinkAllKerb''

[tater]

Yow, that sucks.

A couple weeks ago I started getting SMART warnings, so I threw an SSD in my Mac to replace the failing HD. My (old, crappy) gaming PC is entirely un-backed up, but the mac (with about 40,000 family pics on it) is backed up in triplicate (one off site).

I think I should back up the PC having read your tale of woe (hadn't considered it worth it until just now).

[ColKlonk]

Annoying....

I nowdays, from experience, always place the system OS on a small disk and my important stuff on a 'less used' large second disk, plus two other backup media types

Reminds me to start backing up now.. thanks

[LordFerret]

It will cost you, but there are places that do recovery off such damaged media... so if you're willing to spend the $$$$$, all is not lost. Google is your friend.

Edited June 27, 2015 by LordFerret
missed the 'ing' on willing. oops

[Randazzo]

It will cost you, but there are places that do recovery off such damaged media... so if you're will to spend the $$$$$, all is not lost. Google is your friend.

I'm not pleased with the loss, but I'm not that upset about it really. I was just being dramatic.

Besides, I just had to drop over $300 on a new HDD and a copy of Windows. Windows 8.1 *gag*

Edit: Although I will admit it was astonishingly easy and fast to install, compared to my previous experiences.

Edit2: And for some reason it thinks my name in Jenna Gibson.

Edited June 27, 2015 by Randazzo

[vger]

Edit2: And for some reason it thinks my name in Jenna Gibson.

You're SURE that drive was never used before?

[LordFerret]

Could be a refurbished drive.

[Camacha]

Could be a refurbished drive.

Those should not be sold as new.

[SemiaCloud]

That sucks. I once had something like that happen on my old computer.

[Randazzo]

It's related to the Microsoft Live account, not the drive.

[Guest]

There is some companies ( at least in US), which can restore even badly damaged disks. Not for free, of course, but not that expensive, if disk is more or less intact - not dropped form 10000m into blazing fire for example.

Make sure you repartitioned and reformatted new disk before use.

If it was repaired and resold, there might be information left on disk you don't want to keep for security (and police state surveillance) reasons.

[WinkAllKerb'']

yup yup residual hdd written layers .. if you really need to recover some things ...

[Randazzo]

Again, it's a thing with the Microsoft Live account, not the drive. I have since fixed it after a google search revealed a lot of people with the same issue. Incidentally, all the names are some variation of Jen* *son, such as Jen Watson or Jennifer Paulson. Very odd indeed.

also, PSA: If you have a MSI X58-GD45 Military Class MOBO and you install windows 8.1, you will need version 0.25.2 of the bios or you will only have 2.99 gB of RAM usable.

[Guest]

It's probably have something to do with Adam Jensen.

[Fel]

Make sure you repartitioned and reformatted new disk before use.

If it was repaired and resold, there might be information left on disk you don't want to keep for security (and police state surveillance) reasons.

If there was a police state, then that police state would tell you that "formating" only removes the data at the beginning and end of the partition and encourage you to hard-write zeros to each sector instead.

I also wonder why people consider "off-site backups" as backups. The webpage is under no contract to keep your data (or delete it for that matter) and can easily shut down without warning. Quite frankly, even if warning is given, the site will be DDoS'd from the number of people trying to get their data off. (This is to say, that even if your data is guaranteed, it is actually being converted into a cheap monetary value based on gigabytes used, the service provider has all the cards while you have none.)

Edited July 3, 2015 by Fel

[Amram]

"working" copies should not be present in a single online service, for the reasons you mention, anyone else remember megaupload? Here today, gone tomorrow.

Backups are different. They are by definition not the working set, its a backup. If the backup evaporates with whatever company's collapse, you create a new one from the current state somewhere else. If your primary fails, you recover from the backup.

Having a single potentially volatile backup is the bigger issue. If you rely on online, you need to distribute, 2 or more complete backups on unrelated services, the odds of losing all.....

And still, the in house backup is warranted.

I have important excel sheets and program code. I'd go totally mental if I ever lost the data. It exists on my primary drive, secondary drive, a thumbdrive that only ever sees use as a periodic backup of key files, and across google drive, onedrive, mega.co.nz, and copy.com.

Mega might go down, as may any of the other online services. Two drives may fail the same day. The PC could take a horrendously absurd power surge and bake all hardware installed. Multiple services could go extinct simultaneously.

But 2 internal drives, a thumbdrive, and 4 separate online services to vanish simultaneously?

Online backups are perfectly viable, just don't rely on a single service as the sole source of backup for the data, and especially not as the working set of data.

[pxi]

If you're feeling adventurous:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

In an ideal world you'd drop megabucks getting a professional to do it, but if you've nothing to lose, well you still have options.

If the disk refuses to spin up, one thing that I wouldn't totally recommend, but if it were me I'd probably try is put the disk inside a couple of ziplock bags, and leave in the freezer overnight. Then when powering on the disk, give it a couple of taps with a rubber mallet. It's worked for a couple of drives for us over the years.

Edited July 4, 2015 by pxi

[Randazzo]

I just noticed this came back to life!

My old Hard Drive however, will not. Whatever happened in it's innards produced a horrendous clicking and a loud pop. I tried plugging her back in once I got my new drive/OS going, since I've gotten data off disks that have failed before doing that. Sometimes it's just a bad sector in the wrong place, but I think this was hard mechanical failure.

In the end it's ok though, losing everything spurred me to make new things that are leaps and bounds better. All my photos and such are in online albums (and many KSP screenshots... pics or it didn't happen, you know.), and I don't keep much "business" on the PC.

[T-Bouw]

So something good came out of this for you!

Though you might want to destroy your old HDD.

Screw it open, take the nice magnets out and take a drill to the plates (not the small 2,5" ones though! those are made from glass).

I might take my GF up on her request for a backup...

[micha]

My old Hard Drive however, will not. Whatever happened in it's innards produced a horrendous clicking and a loud pop.

While I know you're not so fussed for others reading this it sounds like maybe the electronics on the controller board fried. Happened to me once. What I did was get exactly the same model HDD and swapped controller boards. This let me boot up the old disk and get the data off.

[InterCity]

You're not alone, my friend. Luckily, I back up regularly. All hail the mighty NAS.