Simeon Amburgey Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 (edited) As I am sharing this the words of @Craig Anderton are singing in my ear but did I listen? Well it's not that I didn't want to or knew that I needed to, it was just that I never thought it would actually happen like it did. I was about to get a very important wakeup call. I had a Project Archive consisting of many years of my personal work as well as my clients on a 2tb Seagate Free Agent USB 2.0 external hard drive. Needless to say I would always brag about how long I had the drive and kept putting more and more of my files there for safe keeping; then it happened. I noticed that things were not running as smooth as they used to and that the drive was all of a sudden not being recognized when I booted into Windows, I went through the normal sense of concern and tried different USB ports, etc. but nothing. I then went to the extreme length of opening up the Free Agent enclosure where lo and behold I discovered the 2tb drive attached to a SATA to USB interface. I removed the drive and connected it to an open SATA port and tried again. This time Windows was a little slower but then ChkDsk came up and looked like it found the problem with the drive and booted as usual with the formerly entombed USB drive now showing. Wow, that's great I thought so I shut things down and then proceeded to re-connect the drive to the USB interface. Now when I tried booting to Windows again all I got was spin, spin, spin...nothing. So I went through the process again; removing the drive and attaching it to the SATA port and tried booting into Windows. This time there was a little whine from the drive and me staring at a black screen with no ChkDsk, no Windows, nothing, just a cold, empty feeling inside. I then realized I might be looking at losing years of not only my work but clients as well. needless to say I was very concerned. I then stopped to consider my options. I did have some success in the past messing around with DOS and one case long ago restoring a Master Boot Record but I felt this was a little more serious so I took a shot and called a local computer system builder near me and they said they would give it a go. Well as you can see from the picture things went great after a lot of prayer and waiting (the process of scanning the defective hard drive, recovering and copying the files to a new drive took the whole of an entire weekend). The were able to recover ALL of my data and transferred it to another drive. One thing they mentioned was it was good that I did not try to continue attempting to recover things on my own as it could have resulted in further damaging the drive. Why am I going into all of this detail? I just want to be a friendly reminder that if it spins, it can die and die at the moment you least expect or want it too. I am hoping to come up with a better strategy and workflow so i do not have to lose any sleep at night wondering if today will be the day I will lose everything. So if your hear a tiny voice during your tracking sessions, it might be myself or Craig reminding you IT"S TIME TO BACK UP! 😀 I would love to hear other users experiences and backup solutions that are working for you? Best regards from someone very grateful as the story could have been a lot different. Edited May 23, 2019 by Simeon Amburgey 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hidden Symmetry Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 (edited) After a corrupted cd project happened to me about 20 years ago (good old bun files) I started backing up religiously. Before I backup my OS I restore the previous perfectly working one (no demos, beta releases, trials, crashes, de-fragmented) Current OS & projects go on 3 different hard drives. ( I also keep an initial install backup of Windows) Projects, masters also to DVD plus finished masters, mp3's, artwork, info to flash drives. One internal drive for current downloads, plugins, samples & DAW related files then about 6 HD's to back those up (mainly samples-VI's). I backup my os about once a month, projects in stages, any new downloads or samples about every 4 months. A bank safe deposit box for one copy of each. Oh yeah, plus I run any additional or older hd's I have about once a year. Edited May 23, 2019 by Hidden Symmetry 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig Anderton Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 There are people who subscribe to my craig_anderton twitter feed solely for the monthly nag I give to back up your data I'll add one more suggestion: it's not enough to back up, the backup needs to be organized so that you can find what you need, when you need it. Knowing that the file you need to restore is "somewhere" can be a problem. I just bought a 4 TB drive last week to backup up my drives of loops and samples. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Sorrels Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 Just fair warning, solid state type drives can/do fail/lose data too. Doesn't have to spin to fail. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simeon Amburgey Posted May 23, 2019 Author Share Posted May 23, 2019 2 minutes ago, Craig Anderton said: There are people who subscribe to my craig_anderton twitter feed solely for the monthly nag I give to back up your data I'll add one more suggestion: it's not enough to back up, the backup needs to be organized so that you can find what you need, when you need it. Knowing that the file you need to restore is "somewhere" can be a problem. I just bought a 4 TB drive last week to backup up my drives of loops and samples. I would be one but as a paraphrase "to him who knoweth to backup and does not do it, to him it is...well you know." Yes, I am one who tends to be a little scattered and very unorganized and as you mention this has caused me to take a very hard look at changing that. I am also reminded of your thoughts on doing an IronClad Backup referenced here: http://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/2653514/Ironclad_Backup_by_Craig_Ander It is something like I said know we should do but like flossing it is hard to really get into the habit. 😎 Thanks so much! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simeon Amburgey Posted May 23, 2019 Author Share Posted May 23, 2019 Just now, Matthew Sorrels said: Just fair warning, solid state type drives can/do fail/lose data too. Doesn't have to spin to fail. Absolutely! and that is a whole new spin to this issue . We were complacent enough with spinning platters and multiple terabytes and now with Solid State drives it ushers in a whole other layer of complacency we need to really be aware of and all the more reason to start good data management habits and routines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
razor7music Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 The 3-2-1 Backup Rule The 3-2-1 backup rule is an easy-to-remember acronym for a common approach to keeping your data safe in almost any failure scenario. The rule is: keep at least three (3) copies of your data, and store two (2) backup copies on different storage media, with one (1) of them located offsite. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simeon Amburgey Posted May 23, 2019 Author Share Posted May 23, 2019 2 minutes ago, razor7music said: The 3-2-1 Backup Rule The 3-2-1 backup rule is an easy-to-remember acronym for a common approach to keeping your data safe in almost any failure scenario. The rule is: keep at least three (3) copies of your data, and store two (2) backup copies on different storage media, with one (1) of them located offsite. YES !- This was the technique I was trying to remember. I tried backing up to DVD several years ago and something must have happened to the DVD-R Drive as some of the discs I burned would not read in other drives and such so always verify the backup you burned on another drive just in case. Also the bank deposit is a good idea. A favorite YouTube channel I watch sometimes EposVox has done a lot on some offsite Synolgy (I think that's the company) offsite NAS drives as a backup (he has them at someone else's house) Thanks for all the responses, keep em' coming it is very helpful not only for me but information we should all put into our toolbox. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
razor7music Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 (edited) Great point. That is one of the most missed steps in the process. CHECK YOUR BACKUPS! No use backing up corrupted data, or storing them in a place that is not conducive to keeping them from getting corrupted. Maybe once a <year?> go back and try to restore your backups to make sure it's still usable. Edited May 23, 2019 by razor7music 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grem Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 Years ago I was cleaning up my project HD and decided to make a backup zip file of the info. Well somewhere along the way I decided I would reformat the drive and restore from my bkup. Yep you guessed it. Zip file would not read. Corrupted. Ever since then I always check any back up I make!! Simeon, I have a 4TB external drive that I got about three/four months ago. Got it for the purpose of bkup on my Music PC. It's still sitting in the box I got it in. : ( So your post has got me to thinking, and I got a funny feeling inside, so when I get home tonight, I am taking that thing out the box and Bk'n up!!! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noel Borthwick Posted May 23, 2019 Share Posted May 23, 2019 I use a synology NAS and it has already bailed me out twice. Since you set it up with redundancy if one drive dies you can simply replace that one drive and get back all your data. Of course the entire NAS can die in a disaster so you need to have cloud storage or redundant NAS backup as well. I use crashplan for cloud storage as well. However since my projects live both on the NAS and the HD there is a low chance of needing the cloud. A NAS is well worth the investment. You can get one with the hard drives for around $600 depending on how much storage you want of course. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gmp Posted May 24, 2019 Share Posted May 24, 2019 I backup my 3 computers every night to a backup HD and then I backup the backup HD to the cloud using Backblaze ($50/yr for unlimited) It took me about 4 months to backup everything to the cloud. I'm still adding some things. Any of us can have a computer disaster no matter how careful we are, so if your computers and data are important to you, you need to have a working plan. I also double check my backup every night to make sure it's doing what it needs to do. Paranoia is a good thing when it comes to backing up. It may save your butt from the unexpected. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msmcleod Posted May 24, 2019 Share Posted May 24, 2019 It's so ironic that this topic should come up now. I've had a week of hardware failures: Last Sunday, my external 2TB backup drive died along killing around 3 months of backups of my website databases, source code & emails. Wednesday, my old laptop (which I use for automated instrument sampling) had the tell-tale ticking noises on it's internal drive And this morning, I woke up to the CPU on my net-top (which I use as a Subversion server, remote email client via VNC and for firing off website backups), grinding loudly which promptly fried the CPU just before leaving for work. Feels like I've been trying to hit a moving target with fixes this week: Monday, I put an old 120GB SSD in an external drive caddy to act as my database backup drive. Yesterday evening and this evening I replaced my old laptop drive with an SSD (thankfully the old drive hadn't quite died yet). And I've just replaced the net-top with one I got off ebay a month ago as a spare, and managed to transfer my emails, SVN repo and set up the database backup. Thankfully, I've not lost anything important, but it was a close call. Time to backup my backups... just in case. Now I'm left worrying what's gonna break next? 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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