{"id":770,"date":"2008-11-09T09:42:19","date_gmt":"2008-11-09T14:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/?p=770"},"modified":"2008-11-09T10:25:57","modified_gmt":"2008-11-09T15:25:57","slug":"all-hard-drives-will-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2008\/11\/09\/all-hard-drives-will-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"All Hard Drives Will Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"
Disk Storage<\/a><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n
View SlideShare presentation<\/a> or Upload<\/a> your own.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

From 2004 to 2008 I was lucky. During that time I didn’t have a single hard drive failure at home. The law of averages caught up with me this past summer. Within a span of thirty days, three of my hard drives, including the hard drives of my two main computers crashed. All the data was gone. Not even SpinRite<\/a> could bring it back.<\/p>\n

Here is the good news.\u00a0 I did not lose anything.\u00a0 All my important data was safe on backup disks.\u00a0 Every night, while I sleep, all my important files (document folders, databases and web site) are archived on external hard drives.\u00a0 I have three different external hard drives, so I always have multiple generations of archived files.<\/p>\n

My friends haven’t been so lucky.\u00a0 In the last month three different people have given me computers with dead hard drives.\u00a0 The hard drives have pictures, personal communications, financial information and other files the owner must have back.\u00a0 None of the files have been backed up anywhere.<\/p>\n

Take a look at the last slide of the embedded PowerPoint.\u00a0 It shows that 4.7 gigabytes of data can be saved to one twenty-five cent recordable DVD.\u00a0 Almost every computer made today has a DVD burner.\u00a0 Using a burner and a quarter-dollar blank DVD, most of your files could be saved.\u00a0 In fact, if you buy a 50 pack of DVDs, you could backup all your files once a week for a year for a total cost of $12.50.<\/p>\n

There are many ways to backup your files.\u00a0 The simplest way is to drag your Documents folder onto a blank DVD.\u00a0 If you have pictures, music or video files,\u00a0 you may have more than 4.7 gigabytes of data.\u00a0 In that case, use multiple disks.\u00a0 I can backup everything important to me using ten blank DVDs.\u00a0 Burning ten DVDs takings more of my time that I want to devote to backups.\u00a0 That’s why I use external hard drives.<\/p>\n

Another tool I use is Mesh<\/a>.\u00a0 This free tool from Microsoft lets me synchronize my files across multiple computers.\u00a0 It’s a “real-time” backup.\u00a0 When I change a file on my home desktop, my office desktop automatically gets the updated version of the file too.\u00a0 It is an automatic off-site backup.<\/p>\n

USB flash drives are also convenient backup devices.\u00a0 Important information can be duplicated on one of these portable drives.\u00a0 Most of my students use USB drives in the computer labs.\u00a0 I have only seen a handful of these drives fail and those were mostly due to physical damage.\u00a0 On the other hand, most of my students have lost a USB flash drive at some point (dropped it somewhere, left it in the lab, etc).\u00a0 Once again, if all your files are on one drive (hard drive, external drive, USB flash drive) and you lose that drive, all your files are gone.<\/p>\n

Given all the digital data we have, personal backups are more important than ever.\u00a0 If you don’t have an established backup routine, establish one today.\u00a0 You will thank yourself later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disk Storage View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. From 2004 to 2008 I was lucky. During that time I didn’t have a single hard drive failure at home. The law of averages caught up with me this past summer. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[114,115],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","tag-backups","tag-disk-drives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}