Hard Drives, Backups and Hard Lessons...
Aug 20, 2015 8:22:09 GMT -6
Nugget, Mystic Wanderer, and 2 more like this
Post by Deleted on Aug 20, 2015 8:22:09 GMT -6
It's been a heck of a week, and in a number of ways. Some things that made this week hell will be among those things which 'just never happened' for leaving in the past. Others? Well..It's been a hell of a week.
Two days ago, my liquid cooling system catastrophically failed on my machine. It lasted well over a year, and a Corsair which kept it at nice low temps without fail..until, of course, it failed.
Now this may be the moment people think it really went badly, but that wasn't the case! In fact, in a way this did me a favor. The old cooling system was a single fan on a small radiator. The replacement is a dual fan, 240mm radiator that takes 2/3's of the top of my case for it's length and width. I see a nice 9c for idle temp now, which is 1/3rd of any other sensor temp showing in my box. That isn't bad.
So, you may ask, if a catastrophic failure to a liquid cooling system wasn't the problem what was??
Well? I had to move a lot of things around to open the case, get the old system out, put the new system in and get it all buttoned back up to reboot (I don't care how many times someone does a thing like this...if it becomes routine? Pay someone else to do it. It's always a bit tricky in one way or another). Moving all that around..is what did it.
Last year, I bought a 4 Terrabyte external drive so I'd have a master backup location, outside my box and its electrical system (for storms and such). It seemed a great idea! The encryption I wasn't given a choice in, didn't make me happy..but I wasn't too worried. After all, in over 25 years of using computers? I can count on one hand the number of Hard Drives I've had go down on me. It happens..but it's damned rare in my experience.
So I never gave a thought to the 4tb drive...until the cord was caught by the corner of my case ...and...it got yanked..and ..well..have you ever had a heavy flat object fall PERFECTLY flat on its side, to make an ugodly SLAP sound on hitting? A real sickening sound to hear..because it means the internals took 100% of the impact shock, without so much as a crack on the outter case. (sigh)
----
4tb..and representing 10 years of archiving...vanished with that slip, fall and slap to the floor. It SEEMED to come back, and I hadn't worried about it...then Windows 10 started acting funky, and flashing icons and tabs at me. I thought I might have had a virus and so went to decrypt my External (it re-encrypted every so often like a sleep timer..and one of its LESS endearing qualities), to find I didn't have one anymore.
Those flashes and system stability issues were the Windows 10 Notification center being spammed errors from the system trying to access the external, a few times a second, endlessly.
----
The bottom line here is to share my experience so others may not suffer it. Now my loss isn't total...thank god. Months ago, I archived some of my critical things (including Cryptome and Wikileaks collections) onto other 'internal' hard drives I connect by USB and then put back on a cabinet shelf every so often. You can't backup 4 TERRABYTE that way though, and I only got some things like music collections, critical sensitive documents and similar things out that way, by happenstance as much as deliberate planning for this.
---
What would have prevented this?
They say the greatest inspirations can come in the middle of the greatest meltdowns..and if I'd not been so distracted by other crisis going on at or around the same time? I might have just had one over this, too. I didn't though, and inspiration came anyway...like a nagging spouse, well after it would do any good. Still..maybe someone else can avoid my fate here.
#1. I should have moved to SSD storage a long time ago, including large scale storage. I've lost two SSD's since I bought my first one a few years back. It happens. More often than magnetics, in fact. Still..You KNOW THIS, in advance, so you always have backups of the files an SSD holds (or you're literally asking for disaster, and tempting it to come). SSD's have NO MOVING PARTS, and I've beat up a couple of them pretty good in using them as giant USB flash drives to the college computers. They take a thumping without crashing.
#2. Most of us have old computers around. I certainly do. I have even more old hard drives and parts I've taken out of systems over the years. A whole shelf of them, in fact. Most are blank now, and reformatted with CCleaner on max bleach a couple times (when I don't need them right away, they can run and wipe for the couple days max. passes takes to complete). I also have USB connectors to use those IDE and SATA hard drives to standard USB ports. That looks like this:
Two days ago, my liquid cooling system catastrophically failed on my machine. It lasted well over a year, and a Corsair which kept it at nice low temps without fail..until, of course, it failed.
Now this may be the moment people think it really went badly, but that wasn't the case! In fact, in a way this did me a favor. The old cooling system was a single fan on a small radiator. The replacement is a dual fan, 240mm radiator that takes 2/3's of the top of my case for it's length and width. I see a nice 9c for idle temp now, which is 1/3rd of any other sensor temp showing in my box. That isn't bad.
So, you may ask, if a catastrophic failure to a liquid cooling system wasn't the problem what was??
Well? I had to move a lot of things around to open the case, get the old system out, put the new system in and get it all buttoned back up to reboot (I don't care how many times someone does a thing like this...if it becomes routine? Pay someone else to do it. It's always a bit tricky in one way or another). Moving all that around..is what did it.
Last year, I bought a 4 Terrabyte external drive so I'd have a master backup location, outside my box and its electrical system (for storms and such). It seemed a great idea! The encryption I wasn't given a choice in, didn't make me happy..but I wasn't too worried. After all, in over 25 years of using computers? I can count on one hand the number of Hard Drives I've had go down on me. It happens..but it's damned rare in my experience.
So I never gave a thought to the 4tb drive...until the cord was caught by the corner of my case ...and...it got yanked..and ..well..have you ever had a heavy flat object fall PERFECTLY flat on its side, to make an ugodly SLAP sound on hitting? A real sickening sound to hear..because it means the internals took 100% of the impact shock, without so much as a crack on the outter case. (sigh)
----
4tb..and representing 10 years of archiving...vanished with that slip, fall and slap to the floor. It SEEMED to come back, and I hadn't worried about it...then Windows 10 started acting funky, and flashing icons and tabs at me. I thought I might have had a virus and so went to decrypt my External (it re-encrypted every so often like a sleep timer..and one of its LESS endearing qualities), to find I didn't have one anymore.
Those flashes and system stability issues were the Windows 10 Notification center being spammed errors from the system trying to access the external, a few times a second, endlessly.
----
The bottom line here is to share my experience so others may not suffer it. Now my loss isn't total...thank god. Months ago, I archived some of my critical things (including Cryptome and Wikileaks collections) onto other 'internal' hard drives I connect by USB and then put back on a cabinet shelf every so often. You can't backup 4 TERRABYTE that way though, and I only got some things like music collections, critical sensitive documents and similar things out that way, by happenstance as much as deliberate planning for this.
---
What would have prevented this?
They say the greatest inspirations can come in the middle of the greatest meltdowns..and if I'd not been so distracted by other crisis going on at or around the same time? I might have just had one over this, too. I didn't though, and inspiration came anyway...like a nagging spouse, well after it would do any good. Still..maybe someone else can avoid my fate here.
#1. I should have moved to SSD storage a long time ago, including large scale storage. I've lost two SSD's since I bought my first one a few years back. It happens. More often than magnetics, in fact. Still..You KNOW THIS, in advance, so you always have backups of the files an SSD holds (or you're literally asking for disaster, and tempting it to come). SSD's have NO MOVING PARTS, and I've beat up a couple of them pretty good in using them as giant USB flash drives to the college computers. They take a thumping without crashing.
#2. Most of us have old computers around. I certainly do. I have even more old hard drives and parts I've taken out of systems over the years. A whole shelf of them, in fact. Most are blank now, and reformatted with CCleaner on max bleach a couple times (when I don't need them right away, they can run and wipe for the couple days max. passes takes to complete). I also have USB connectors to use those IDE and SATA hard drives to standard USB ports. That looks like this:
The piece with the clear cord and a little to the right of center plugs directly into the back of drives or can use a cable to extend the reach. The main thing is, they can run 100% outside the computer, despite being internal drives. The above kit even runs old ZIP drives, floppy drives and/or cd drives as a side note.
I could have..and should have..been rotating backups of everything, and never taken this super-external drive for size to be THE main dump for backups ...since losing it, lost it all.
#3. Last, but not least, I could have "used the cloud"...and right this moment? I'm wishing like hell I had. Sure...I had images, satellite photos, documents and other things of a sensitive nature. It is why I actually can't take this drive in to have it worked on for recovery. There are things on that drive that ARE 'that' sensitive in both personal information to specific individuals that ..cannot..just get out somehow as well as some things I'm not 110% sure are legal to even have now. Several issues of Inspire Magazine come to mind for the context of THAT concern, and that is Al Qaeda's rag to spead the bad cheer among terrorists around the world.
So, it is clear I could never have simply signed up to DropBox or something else and said 'upload everything'. Not even as a joke...still..there were probably a full couple Terra of routine nonsense and B.S., as well as backups from a dozen or more past machines, that had nothing remotely sensitive...and no reason whatever to be concerned with cloud storage. It would have been there to recover. It would have been like gold at a moment like this.
---
So, there is my tale of woe and a week of bad luck and bad happenings on several levels. Oh joy and what a jolly one its been. Still? The three points above are, in hindsight, what would have saved the catastrophe of total, unrecoverable data loss to..ahem..FOUR Terrabyte worth of archives (sigh)
Live and learn..I suppose. They also say the lessons learned hard are learned best. Well, I dunno about all that, but I damn sure won't forget this lesson. It's been one of the hardest to accept as having actually happened, in the split second it did.
Never trust technology. Back up. Then back that up...and when both are complete for a fall back-up to the backup? Make a third...of at least the basics everyone has that CANNOT be lost...before it is.
I could have..and should have..been rotating backups of everything, and never taken this super-external drive for size to be THE main dump for backups ...since losing it, lost it all.
#3. Last, but not least, I could have "used the cloud"...and right this moment? I'm wishing like hell I had. Sure...I had images, satellite photos, documents and other things of a sensitive nature. It is why I actually can't take this drive in to have it worked on for recovery. There are things on that drive that ARE 'that' sensitive in both personal information to specific individuals that ..cannot..just get out somehow as well as some things I'm not 110% sure are legal to even have now. Several issues of Inspire Magazine come to mind for the context of THAT concern, and that is Al Qaeda's rag to spead the bad cheer among terrorists around the world.
So, it is clear I could never have simply signed up to DropBox or something else and said 'upload everything'. Not even as a joke...still..there were probably a full couple Terra of routine nonsense and B.S., as well as backups from a dozen or more past machines, that had nothing remotely sensitive...and no reason whatever to be concerned with cloud storage. It would have been there to recover. It would have been like gold at a moment like this.
---
So, there is my tale of woe and a week of bad luck and bad happenings on several levels. Oh joy and what a jolly one its been. Still? The three points above are, in hindsight, what would have saved the catastrophe of total, unrecoverable data loss to..ahem..FOUR Terrabyte worth of archives (sigh)
Live and learn..I suppose. They also say the lessons learned hard are learned best. Well, I dunno about all that, but I damn sure won't forget this lesson. It's been one of the hardest to accept as having actually happened, in the split second it did.
Never trust technology. Back up. Then back that up...and when both are complete for a fall back-up to the backup? Make a third...of at least the basics everyone has that CANNOT be lost...before it is.
