Sounds You Never Want to Hear: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-21-07

Long-time readers will remember that it was just over a year ago that Seagate kindly sent me a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive, which I gleefully installed and which has been performing faithfully ever since. Just a few days ago I had set it up as a print server, seeing no need to have a separate print server when this would work as well.

Unfortunately, my printer (an Epson Stylus Photo 1280, not in the first flush of its youth) doesn't really seem to like print servers. I had no end of trouble with the stand-alone Netgear print server, and yesterday I started having trouble using it through the network drive. So I started messing about with the settings on Teras (that's the drive, named for its 1 TB capacity) to see whether I could reinstall or otherwise sort out the printer.

Unfortunately, I had somehow mislaid the main administrative password for the drive. I have no idea how I managed to do this, since I store almost all my passwords in Password Prompter, and the only passwords I don't write down are the familiar ones I use all the time.

Fortunately, it's possible to reset the administrative password on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive without affecting the data or even the other user information. It does require renaming the drive and setting a new password, which I did without trouble. (And this time I put it right into Password Prompter.)

When I'd finished doing that, the Ur-Guru went back to copying photos he'd shot that morning into the Public folder on Teras. I was examining the advanced settings to see whether I could find anything that would help me with the printer when Stefan asked "Did you just do something?"

No, actually, I hadn't. But the power light on the network drive had gone from green to amber (something I'd only seen during the reset) and the light indicating drive activity had gone off. The administrative interface stopped responding. Neither the power button nor the reset button produced any response.

I tried looking up the significance of the amber light in the Maxtor knowledge base, but nothing I found was very helpful, as they all referred to specific series of flashes, whereas this light was fluttering like a bad case of heart palpitations.

After a while, unwillingly, I pulled out the power cable. We dusted off the drive, reconnected it, and tried again. It appeared to go through a normal powering-up sequence, but there were some odd clicking noises.

"Is that normal?" Stefan asked.

"I've never heard it before," I responded, "And I don't like it."

I liked it a lot less when it devolved into a rhythmic rocking sound. Tock, tock. Tock, tock. The Ur-Guru explains that this is the sound of the head trying to read data across the disk and then returning (tock!) to the "park" position.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, very bad. Listen for yourself.

It was at this point that we realized that the RAID-1 option on the drive isn't all that helpful, as there's no way to tell the Maxtor Shared Storage II to use the other disk. Unlike traditional RAID boxes, the drives in the MSS-II are sealed into a single container—one I'm not about to try opening. So my data may be intact, but I'm in no position to get at it.

Now, being me, I have other copies of most of what's on that drive. My active business and financial data, not to mention my Outlook PST file, gets backed up at least once a day to other places, notably the new FreeAgent Go drive and the second internal drive. (Some of the client data also gets backed up online via Mozy.) I have most of the older client data on DVDs that I make at the end of the year. At least some of the software install packages exist on their original CDs, and some of the rest is freeware I can download again. Much of it, indeed, was probably obsolete; I download a lot of things in order to test them. The stuff I use most is also on the F drive.

If I've learned anything in four years of writing this Backup Reminder, it's that one copy does not make a backup. So I don't think I've lost anything irreplaceable.

But I'm two weeks past the drive's measly one-year warranty period. And even though I didn't have to pay for it in the first place, I'll almost certainly have to pay to replace it. And while the price has come down considerably since the drive was introduced last year, I'm not at all sure that I want to turn that into an annual investment.

The main reason I went with Seagate's FreeAgent Go instead of the Western Digital Passport was the 5-year warranty on the Seagate drive. Given what just happened with my Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, I'd hesitate to get a replacement NAS drive—from any manufacturer—without a longer warranty.

The moral of the story: just because you have a large drive that can serve as catch-all backup and storage for every machine in your house doesn't mean you don't have to keep additional copies of your data. Any drive can fail, and every drive eventually will. If it's important to you, make sure you keep it in more than one place.

Next Friday I will be at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, so it's a good bet that the backup reminder will focus on something related to backing up audio and video files--or perhaps to making backups while traveling. (It will be the first time my FreeAgent Go drive goes someplace with me.)

Meanwhile, I'm really hoping to hear something from Seagate.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor Shared Storage II, Seagate

Shaking Up Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-20-07

The earthquake at much-too-early-AM today reminded me that it really might be a better idea to sleep with the computer under the bed than on top of it. On the other hand, I’d probably give myself a hernia reaching for it every morning, and the ceiling is the only thing that can actually fall on it where it is. And if that happens, I might not be around to worry about my data. (Yes, I sleep with my computer, at least when the Ur-Guru isn’t here. So sue me.)

Though my clients might still be around to worry about their data, in which case it might be useful if someone knew my main password. If the machine is trashed, one ought to be able to get to the data by removing the drive altogether, but if it’s only the Sallie that’s trashed, perhaps better to keep the computer intact. (Though I don’t know…maybe I’d prefer to have it self-destruct if I stop breathing. I go back and forth on these kinds of things.)

Let’s pass over the question of whether it’s morbidity or senility that turning 40 has brought me, however, and get on to the stories I said I’d have for you last week. So we’ll start with Sandy’s dead CrackBerry. Sandy is the author of the about-to-be released book fEmpowerment: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, but no special effects were used in the creation of this story.

My BlackBerry has “off and on” had the bottom line of keys stop working (that means, for example, b-n-m do not work). A “hard reboot” (dumping the battery out and back in) fixes it. It doesn’t happen all that often, so I hadn’t taken the time to go get another machine from the Nextel folks.

Monday, I was out and about, and (of course) I have a passcode on my BlackBerry. My passcode includes the letter “B.” I’m sure that you can imagine where this is going… I hit the passcode to get in a few times, “counting down” the passwords you’re “allowed.” Used them all—it dumped the BlackBerry and then gave me a “507” error (which is a circle with a line through it, over a small picture of the screen—not very pleasant).

After I cursed a lot, I had a “light bulb” moment and realized what had probably happened. So I went home, since now the machine was a hunk of junk. (Have you seen the guy put the iPhone through the blender in “Will it Blend?” That’s how I felt.) I figured that I had to call support and they would ask for my mother’s maiden name and 2nd aunt’s middle initial, and then they would allow me to boot up the hunk of junk.

Uh—no. If you do this, your BlackBerry gets fried. As in no retrieval-oh.

Luckily I synch the BlackBerry every day when I get home—so I’d “only” lost what I’d done that day while out and about. And far MORE luckily, I have a service plan that includes “real person” support, so I toddled off to the Nextel store, and they replaced it with a new machine, and I synched it up to the computer, and downloaded all the info back into it.

So, that’s the words to the wise.

I don’t actually use any kind of a PDA at all, but having no option but to recycle the hardware seems like a slightly extreme reaction to password problems, and it’s not like Sandy was carrying military secrets around. I suspect this particular “feature” of the BlackBerry was invented to satisfy security-conscious enterprise and government users, who are daily embarrassed by stories of laptops, backup tapes, and the like falling into the wrong hands.

It’s harder to see the value of total hardware lockout to an individual. And come to that, frying the device if you mess up your password doesn’t prevent employees from deliberately passing on company data. I hope they can at least send it back to the factory and get it refurbished and reissued.

On the other hand, Sandy did get a new device with working keys out of the adventure. Because the data was backed up, having to replace the BlackBerry was annoying and inconvenient, but not catastrophic.

Then there was my colleague Donna Papacosta in Canada, where Apple is apparently less paranoid about repossessing dead hard drives than they are in the US. Her 13-month-old MacBook keeled over without warning one day. “Of COURSE my files were backed up,” she said in response to my comment on her original post. “Except for the ones that weren’t.”

Unless you’re using a continuous data protection solution that copies everything the minute it changes (and eats bandwidth for breakfast), you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose *some* files if you suffer a fatal drive error. Donna is now backing up several times a day, both online and to an external drive. That’s often enough that anything that slips through the cracks is probably something you can live without, or recent enough to be easier to re-create than the project you were working on last week.

Get all the details of Donna’s MacBook adventures on the Trafcom News Blog. But make a backup before you go off to read it.

No One Is Spared: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-06-07

In response to my sulk last week about my dying disk drive, one Mac-using friend wrote:

Luckily for me I'm just a humble user now--and I've got a Mac. When I had a similar looking problem some time back it was quickly fixed the next day by a tech at the Mac Genius Bar. A firmware problem; remedied on start-up from the keyboard.

Signed:
Gloating in Berkeley

Of course, anyone who’s been reading long enough knows that Macs have disk failures, too. In case you didn’t, there’s a new article on the subject by Robin Harris over at ZDNet, entitled “Death of a Disk”. It’s actually about the death of two disks, both Macs.

And Apple has a policy of repossessing your dead disk if they replace it, which has rubbed a few people the wrong way, with some reason. But I’m not going to rehash that here.

Macs may or may not have more reliable operating systems and software than PCs. In general, Apple seems to build fairly good-quality hardware. But it’s also worth remembering that the only real reason there are so few Mac viruses is that so few people own Macs. If Apple had a larger market share in computers, there would be more viruses designed to attack them.

It’s possible that I could take my ailing X drive to my favorite repair person and get the problem sorted out. I could, indeed, try putting the drive in a different case myself, and see what happens. (Possibly I could have avoided the on-again, off-again problems I’ve had with it by buying a more expensive case in the first place.) If I were a serious hardware geek, I’d certainly do that. But then, if I were a serious hardware geek, I’d probably have half a dozen 2.5-inch drive cases just lying around my office.

There does come a point at which you have to decide not to throw good money after bad. Not that I consider the X drive a bad investment. The poor thing has been in constant use for several years now, and it’s come along on several trips and thus withstood being squished into overhead bins on airplanes, not to mention surviving my car accident last September.

But having a professional diagnose and correct the problem will almost certainly cost more than buying a new drive which has twice the capacity and a 5-year warranty. And I’d still have a four-year-old hard drive nearing the end of its natural lifespan, which would substantially undermine my trust in it. And you have to be able to trust your backups. So even if I get a new case for the old drive, I’d want to get a new drive.

And in the meantime, I don’t have to panic, because I have the data on two other drives. Some of it is also on CD or DVD. Some of it is in my Mozy online storage account. So even if I can’t recover the data from this drive (and I think I probably will be able to), I’m safe.

The End of the Drive as We Know It? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-01-07

I’ve written more than a few columns about hard drive failures. The hard drive is one of the most vulnerable points on your computer (though perhaps less vulnerable than your power connector, if you have a laptop). Most of the internal workings of a computer are solid state: they have no moving parts. But hard drives not only have moving parts, they move terrifyingly fast.

The interior of a hard disk always reminds me of an old-fashioned record player—except that the fastest a record spins is 78 RPMs, and the average 3.5” (desktop-sized) hard disk spins at 7200 RPMs. Your car would be redlining if it reached that speed. I know manual transmissions are almost as rare as vinyl albums these days, but it’s just possible some of you have seen an analog tachometer before. If the car’s crankshaft is turning at 7200 RPMs, you’re going to burn out your engine.

If you think about it in those terms, it’s no surprise that hard drives wear out—especially since the arm on a hard disk doesn’t touch the platters at all—or, at least, it had better not, or the result will be a lot worse than dragging the needle across a record and leaving a scratch. Take it from me, high-speed accidents are not pretty.

Despite their fragility, hard drives have been our best option for data storage so far—at least when we need to read, write, and retrieve data quickly. Imagine how slow it would be if you had a tape drive inside your computer and had to rewind it in order to get to a document you’d saved yesterday. And tape is just as vulnerable to the problem of moving parts, at least if you’re re-using it on a regular basis.

Now, however, it looks as though flash drives are poised to replace hard drives. Almost everyone seems to own at least one gadget that relies on flash memory: a digital camera, a USB memory stick, an MP3 player. Flash memory requires no moving parts, and you can drop a flash drive without catastrophic consequences. (My cousin’s first-generation iPod Shuffle actually survived a trip through the washer and dryer none the worse for wear, which amazes me.)

The first time I wrote about flash memory, back in October of 2004, it was still pretty unreliable. The built-in memory in a PDA was prone to “flash” out of existence if the device was left uncharged. Even as memory sticks became more reliable, and larger, they still suffered from a limitation on the number of times they could be overwritten. That problem has been largely overcome, leaving the proportionately higher cost of flash memory the last real barrier to replacing hard drives with flash drives.

I’d been reading about this for a while, but it was still all theoretical. In his last “Technology and You” column for BusinessWeek, Steve Wildstrom actually test-drove a flash-based laptop from Dell. (Well, okay, he test-drove it first and then wrote the column, unlike some of us, who write our reviews in the middle of checking out the product.) His conclusions were interesting:

First, the flash drive is noticeably faster for reading and writing, particularly when it comes to lots of small files. When I heard that (I was listening to the podcast version), I thought immediately of PT and his Maxtor Shared Storage woes. A large flash drive sounds like it could be the solution to storage problems involving zillions of tiny files, which clog networks and transfer at a glacial pace.

Second, a move away from hard drives could mean a substantial change in the design of laptops, which will no longer need to make space for a traditional 2.5” (or even 1.8”) drive. Though, on second thought, I’m not sure how substantial it can be and still accommodate a keyboard, a screen, and an optical drive. I guess we’ll just have to find out.

Third, flash memory requires less power and produces less heat than a magnetic drive. That means longer battery life for your laptop. (It’s also a lot quieter.)

Fourth—and this is the bad news—Dell’s surcharge for providing a flash-based drive instead of a traditional hard drive is $500. You can buy a lot of hard drive for that kind of money.

So I think it will be a while yet before flash drives replace hard drives in most computers, even for the early-adopter types. Perhaps by the time I next buy a new laptop (which I envision as being at least two years from now), flash drives will be more common. But it’s going to take much longer before flash drives dominate enterprises or educational institutions, neither of which replaces anything until it breaks. And I have no idea whether you could create RAID storage with flash drives, or whether flash memory would be feasible for a server.

In any case, even if we do reach an era where drive failure is almost unheard-of, it won’t mean an end to the need for backups. The most common cause of data loss is human error, and that’s not likely to change just because of hardware improvements. Nor will flash drives do anything to keep out viruses or spyware, or to prevent your system from crashing at an inconvenient moment. So don’t think you’re about to be let off the hook!

The Halloween Backup Reminder: Wanna See Something Really Scary?

'Tis the season when folks hang skeletons in their windows and visit haunted houses, and it only seemed right to get into the spirit of Halloween by providing some computer-related horror stories. Back in 1998, Geek Culture’s Mind Numbing Magazine™ created a clever introductory page for the computer horror stories they hoped to collect:

It can happen to anyone, even you. One minute you’re fine, working away on your faithful computer, the next minute you’re living a nightmare! Somehow, for no apparent reason, your most trusted friend has turned against you with every silicon fibre of its being:

• Months of work has disappeared in a nanosecond.
• Everything that defines you as a geek is gone. Perhaps forever.
• And to top it all off, your backup Zip™ drive is now click-click-clicking itself to death.

The idea didn’t catch on, though you can find plenty of people recounting their own tales of electronic woe online. In most cases, there’s nothing spooky, eerie, or cinematic about computer disasters. Most data loss disasters happen without special effects, though the DriveSavers Museum of Disk-Asters has some pretty spectacular photos of the kinds of physical damage computers can suffer.

I’d certainly be horrified if I came home to find my laptop a burned-out shell and my external hard drives scorched and melted. And right now it would take something that destroyed my whole office to deprive me of my business data. But that would be enough to do it, because I still haven’t found a really effective off-site backup solution for myself. And it *is* fire season in California.

Nevertheless, hard drive failures and human error are far more common than earthquakes, fires, and floods. So…you wanna see something really scary? How about a $2000 data recovery bill for a week’s worth of work lost when a laptop died on the way back from a business trip. Or coming home from a vacation in Europe to discover that the server died without anyone noticing and the backup tapes were useless? A year and $10,000 later, that company still has data that has to be re-entered by hand from printouts.

If it’s important, back it up now. If it’s really important, back it up offsite as well as locally. Then it won’t matter if your computer plays tricks on you.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-29-06: "But I Did Back Up!"

My long-time client and colleague Eve Abbott, Organizer Extraordinaire, kindly offered to act as guest columnist for this week’s Backup Reminder while I’m at the Podcast Expo. I’ll be back next week as usual.

"But I DID Back Up My Computer Files!"

By Eve Abbott

Why are computer crashes like earthquakes? Because it is a sure thing that it is when, not if. I bought a brand new Hewlett Packard Pavilion XP system and began to back up weekly. Seven months later, I returned from making a cup of tea to hear my computer going click-click-click loudly. My hard drive had just crashed for no reason at all. As is often the case, I lost everything on it.

I felt confident because I had my data backed up by copying my entire working C-drive onto CDs—but even with backups, and even if your computer is still under warranty, let’s get realistic about how much time and money a crash can end up costing you.

Time:

It took four days for me to get the special shipping box HP sent me to return the computer. They replaced the hard drive, and it was returned within 10 business days at no charge for repair and shipping. This still adds up to three weeks without my computer.

Energy

First, I rented a laptop and spent hours installing the programs I normally use. Laptop rental cost me $250.00 for one month, with a $500 refundable deposit. I could have rented a desktop system for a little less per month, but I would have had to wait a week to get the computer. It was great to have the laptop to use until my repaired computer arrived. But, I had to go through the same restoration process again when it was returned with a new hard drive. More time lost and more frustration, too.

Second, I spent hours importing my data from backup CDs. I still lost almost a week’s worth of data (Quicken entries, Word documents, calendar and contact information) because that’s how long I go between backups.

Third, I spent hours recreating the custom settings on my software. Fourth, I had to install some smaller programs that I’d forgotten were added on after my first programs backup.

Damage

I paid $1,000.00 in computer consultant fees to get the laptop set up, and my computer taken apart and set up again to get it running A-OK. That’s apart from data recovery costs, which my backups saved me from having to pay.

The grand total: $1,250.00 and 7 days in lost time.

Pretty expensive considering that I had all my current data backed up onto CDs.

There are four questions you need to ask yourself regarding your back-ups:

1)How critical is your data? (My business and life are on my hard drive = critical)

2)Do you add or process high volumes of information?

3) In what time frame do you add enough to make it a real loss? (day, week, per project)

4) Do you work with very large files of any type?

The more information you process or add to your computer hard drive, the more often you need to back up. For high volume or crucial files you need to backup daily.

CD:

I recommend you archive paper every year after taxes (along with a backup of your accounting program and data), consider backing up entire projects onto CD when you’re finished. This keeps the data available and safe, without cluttering your hard drive. You can file a project closeout CD with the matching archived paper files. Or keep a variety of backups in a CD organizer (date labeled) divided up into Projects, Backups and Programs.

The backup CDs I use are ‘data only’ to safeguard important information in case a problem develops in between system backups. My personal number one CD backup is the updated text of my books. If you are going to archive data (e.g., taxes) and may not access the backup for a long time – go with CDs. CDs are more stable, and you are less likely to run into trouble with irretrievable data. Always use premium brand-name CDs (or other media) for backups.

External Hard Drive (XHD)

I chose this option after my crash disaster because I can recreate my entire system without the wasted time of restoring my operating system and settings, downloading programs and data from backups, and resetting application customizations, etc.

This option allows you to completely restore your computer, if necessary (with no hard drive damage). Or, install a new hard drive on your computer and then restore immediately.

After backing up, I store the XHD in the trunk of my car (in a laptop case for protection). Even if the house burns down I still have my entire computer capability just outside in my car.

Backup, BackUp, BACKUP!

So, how can you combine these different backup choices to work in your particular situation?

Take the simplest method that will safeguard your information. If all you need is a CD organizer box for backups – great!

I use the XHD weekly for a programs and data off-site backup. In between I use CDs, depending on the size of the files and how long I want to maintain them.

Also, Sallie now has me on a daily automatic backup onto some kind of monster external hard drive that is in the computer closet at my office location. That’s because my new book A Brain New Way to Work™ is in the final stages and I don’t want to lose even a smidgen of work done on the text and pictures.

If you do nothing, you are guaranteed to have a disaster sooner or later. Choose what works best for you and set a reminder to BACK UP as often as you need to stay sane when it does happen.

Sign up for Sallie’s backup reminder and contact her for your particular questions. And fear not, the FileSlinger will be back next week. Thanks for letting me pinch-hit for our champion!

Tips excerpted from How to Do Space-Age Work with a Stone-Age Brain.™

© 2006 Eve Abbott. All rights reserved.

Hard Drive Swan Song

Greg Hess of Crossbow Design has posted a recording of his hard drive's death throes. Note the whimpering sound at the end.

If you ever hear your drive make noises like this, turn it off immediately before you lose even more data.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-26-06: Disappearing Partitions, Part II

This week (as I prepare to dash out to a 7:30 AM meeting) we return to the saga of my brother’s attempt to recover data from his failing external drive. Last week, you may recall, the recovery program (which I mistakenly identified as Final Recovery) had been running for 48 hours and was 1/3 finished. Now that a week has passed, I asked my brother what kind of progress he’d made. Here is his answer:

I ended up running the Recover my Files program. When I first installed and tried to run these two programs, it seemed that the system would freeze and/or not recognize the corrupt drive. After awhile of that mess, I decided to quick format the drive, hoping that it would be recognized and trusting that the programs would be able to recover files anyway.

That did seem to help, but Final Recovery still appeared to hang. Perhaps I didn't let it run long enough to register that it was working.

Recover my Files has a status bar that showed activity right away, so I let that one run.
After 5 or six days, it showed that if had located 14,000+ files and was 80% finished searching the drive. Because it hadn't picked up any new files for a day, I stopped the search before it was complete. After another day, it had restored a few thousand files at least. But I haven't had time to really go through what it saved. I can tell that there is a lot missing and that there are a lost of recovered files that seem to be corrupt. So it looks like I will lose a fair amount of data (mostly image files).

Before this happened, I had been accumulating all of my images onto this disk to facilitate an eventual backup to DVD (looks like I was dilatory). This means that many of the files had been copied from other drives, and it looks like I will be able to recover a large number of files that had been deleted on those drives too. All in all, I might be able to save 50% or more. Some of the lost files are on CD or online storage, perhaps another 10-15%. The biggest loss is of raw (.crw .cr2) image files; .tif and .jpg files seemed to have been recovered with better success. But I'd toss all of those to save the raw files.

RAW files, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are uncompressed image files, the native format of my brother’s very fancy digital camera. A lot of the photos are doubtless of his children (who are adorable, if I do say so myself).

The moral of this story, as of all the stories I tell in this newsletter, is back up sooner rather than later. It’s also important to remember the difference between storage and backup. If you’re an avid photographer like my brother and don’t have room on your main drive to keep all those photos, putting them onto an external drive is a logical move. But just because the photos aren’t stored on your internal drive doesn’t mean they’re backed up. You still have to make a second copy of them, and it’s a good idea to make that backup copy to a different medium. If you’re using DVDs as your main storage method, back the files up onto an external drive, and vice versa.

All of this reminds me that I should make more DVDs, myself, even though I now have many of my files stored on two or even three different hard drives. DVDs can get scratched or suffer from rot; hard drives, as we know, can fail in countless horrifying ways. By using more than one kind of backup, you’re insulating yourself against more possible problems.

Next week I’ll talk about why people don’t back up—even if they’ve suffered catastrophic data loss in the past.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-19-06: Disappearing Partitions

Tuesday morning I got a message from my not-so-little brother in Cleveland:

OK computer expert, I've got a question for you. I have an external HD that had two partitions. I just noticed that one partition - the larger one and lower logical drive letter, will not read. When I click on it in My Computer, it hums for awhile and then says that the drive is not formatted, do I wish to format it. Not really, because I would like to recover the files on it if possible. The other partition seems to work fine. I have no idea how the partition might have been wiped or whatever. I recently ran defrag on it, but other than that, it was working fine. Any ideas?

Well, no, actually. This was one I hadn’t run across before. I haven’t had a lot of experience with partitioning drives, because most of my hard drives have been small enough not to need partitioning, and I now have two separate physical drives on my main computer, though one of them has a small partition for DVD QuickPlay in addition to holding the C:\ drive.

So I passed my brother’s message on to the Ur-Guru to see what he had to say about it, which was this:

I'd say before trying any recovery tools... first make an image backup of the entire xHD to some place, just in case the recovery screws up (which sometimes it does and makes it worse).

A "not formatted" usually indicates that the partition got damaged but it says nothing about the data. On the other hand it could be an actual surface failure.

Check in the event log and see if any disk failure type entries are in there and what details they might reveal.

Go to computer management (admin tools) and select the disk management from the tree, check what it says there. Often it could be that the system remembers the partition and drive letter but it needs to be imported. Red warning icons or error icons might appear on the disk management bars where it shows the partitions and disks. That might also reveal what's going on with the xHD partition. Status in the listview should say "Healthy" if everything is fine.

My first guess would be it's an actual drive failure that has affected just the one partition. If the entire xHD was a single partition it might affect the whole thing which at least would make it look more like a total failure.

Before sending that on to my brother, I added a note about where to find the Administrative Tools (in the Control Panel; though they may also be on your “All Programs” list) and where to look in the Computer Management tool for the disks (under Disk Management, which is at least logical, unlike, say, using the Start button to shut down).

I also included a warning. Physical damage to a hard drive is very bad news. System failures may put your data out of reach temporarily, but damage to a drive—which is what data recovery geeks mean when they say “crash”—can destroy your data as if it never existed. If your hard drive is making evil noises (clanking, clacking, screeching), your best bet is to shut the machine down and get the drive to a professional data recovery service where they can take it apart in a sterile environment rather like a hospital operating room.

My brother’s response was that he didn’t have Ghost or TrueImage, but did have enough space to copy the disk. Since he was at work by this time and the problem was with his home computer, he wasn’t able to check the Event Viewer immediately. Once he did, however, what he found was definitely not good news:

In the event log, there are a hundred or so errors listed from the last few days that are all the same.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7
Date: 5/15/2006
Time: 8:04:10 PM
User: N/A
Computer: MAIN
Description:
The device, \Device\Harddisk2\D, has a bad block.

That was confirmation of the Ur-Guru’s suspicions. This left my brother with two choices: attempt to use data recovery software, or go to the professionals. Why is this an either-or case? Amateur attempts to recover data can sometimes make things worse. To quote the Ur-Guru, “The serious recovery folks don't want you to even look at a drive before sending it off, actually. And they have a point.”

Either way, it was clear that the drive had reached the end of its usable life, because even if it could be reformatted, it might give out again at any moment. (The argument against disk-based backup is that hard drives, with all their moving parts, are just as vulnerable to failure outside your computer as inside it.)

My brother professed himself willing to ditch the drive as long as he could get the data back, and elected to try using FinalRecovery. I’ve never used that one myself.

As of this morning, the program has been running for 48 hours and is only about 1/3 finished, so we don’t know how much data my brother will get back. At least the disk doesn’t seem to be damaged in such a way that trying to use it makes the problem worse.

Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion to the saga!

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I'll be speaking about podcasting (and blogging too, a little) on May 24, June 28, July 28, August 9, and at the Podcast Expo on September 29. Details will be posted on my other blog under Author-ized Appearances as soon as I have them.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-17-06: A Potent Reminder

'Tis a swamped sort of morning for me, so I’m going to be brief here and point you to another source of backup-related information.

For most people, a drive failure is just a disaster. For New York Times “Circuits” columnist David Pogue, it’s raw material--and something to get on TV with. After his adventures with DriveSavers, he did a piece for CBS called “CPR for Your Computer’s Hard Drive,” in which he describes several celebrity hard drive failures. You can watch the video by clicking “watch” at http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/sunday/main3445.shtml (toward the bottom of the page).

As if that wasn’t enough mileage to get out of one story, Pogue’s latest column describes his tour of DriveSavers’ “Museum of Bizzare Disc-asters.” It’s highly entertaining—and simultaneously sobering. Hop on over to Pogue's latest "Circuits" newsletter and check it out.

But back up your data first, just in case these spectactular disasters give your computer any ideas.

Ontrack Data Disaster League Table

British data recovery company Ontrack has published its 2005 League Table of the funniest and most frightening real-life computer crises of its customers, from the laptop full of cockroaches to the dog's favorite memory stick.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-25-05: Give Thanks for Your Backups

The United States celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday with the usual exuberant overindulgence in turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Before you head out for the nation’s biggest shopping day, take a moment to be grateful for your backups.

Even though backing up your computer can be a tedious process, and it might be annoying to have all that storage space taken up with your drive images and file copies, or to be sending tapes and CDs offsite, or to be paying monthly fees for an online backup service, those backups are sparing you from far greater inconvenience and expense. Like insurance, backups can mean the difference between staying in business and going out of business.

I’ve talked to three people in as many weeks who’ve had serious computer failures. One colleague was thinking he ought to clean up and back up his Entourage database (which held all his mailing list information as well as his business contacts), but didn’t have time before going out of town. When next he tried to use the database, it had become hopelessly corrupted. Last I heard, the computer was off at DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com). His chances of getting his data back are good, because there’s no physical damage to the drive, but the price will be high, and the timing was terrible.

There’s never a good time to have your server go down, discover that half your RAID 1 array has been dead for months, and *then* find out that your tape backups have also failed. Running a business which handles hundreds of transactions a day without a computer is no one’s idea of a good time. The dead server is in a white room at Lazarus Data Recovery (http://www.lazarus.com/) and the owner of the afflicted business is looking at alternative backup solutions.

A few days ago I was talking to a friend on the phone and she mentioned that she really would like to get a new computer soon. No sooner had the words left her mouth than her motherboard failed, though it wasn’t until she took the machine to the shop that she knew the problem wasn’t with the drive. Fortunately for her, she had backups of almost everything, no more than a week old—and she has a lumbering old computer that she can use to access those files while the main machine is repaired.

So if you have backups—be grateful. And if you don’t have backups—make some, and give yourself a reason to be grateful. There are probably some great external drives, DVD-burners, and other helpful tools available at the Thanksgiving sales.

Backups and Organizing

In her new "Don't Agonize—Organize!" blog, Eve Abbott describes the nightmare that hard drive failure can be even if you have backups. This disaster happened to her before she started using Norton Ghost, which would have made reinstalling on her repaired system much faster and easier. There's no way around the hassles involved if you have to rent a computer for a week or two while yours is repaired, though—or is there? Write in with your suggestions.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-26-05: Backup in the New York Times—Don't Let This Happen to You

Yesterday two different people sent me links to David Pogue’s column in the “Circuits” section of the New York Times, so I thought I’d better mention it here.

The headline is “Another reminder to back up,” with the much more provocative subtitle “You can only be lucky for so long.” In it, Pogue describes the adventures (and headaches) caused by the crash of his Dell hard drive, which ultimately inspired him to consult DriveSavers, story to be continued. The person he talked to at DriveSavers told him that the only good hard drive is the one that’s backed up. Pogue had backed up “My Documents,” but not his Outlook PST folder or his Dragon Naturally Speaking “training” files.

I’m glad to see backup mentioned in a high-profile non-tech publication, of course. What surprises me is that such a well-known author and columnist on tech subjects should have failed to back up such an obvious thing as his Outlook data. (Whoops, there go 2000 e-mails from readers of the column.)

Which brings me to a question that one of my writing clients asked me the other day. “With your background in languages, what the heck are you doing writing about computer backups?”

First, I try to respond to what clients ask for, and back in 2003 one of my Tech Services clients asked for a weekly backup reminder. (This was the day before I had to spend 12 straight hours salvaging his data, reformatting his hard drive, and reinstalling all his software, after which I got a serious lecture from my bodyworker about throwing myself on laptops as if they were grenades.)

Just as importantly, though, it’s because of situations like Pogue’s. People who ought to know better—who probably do know better—still don’t back up. And then, eventually, tragedy strikes.

And how, asked a podcaster who just phoned to discuss using his audios as the basis of an e-book series, do you write about something you don’t have a background in? (Just in case you don’t know, my degrees are in classical languages and literature, not computer science, engineering, or anything like that.)

Research, that’s how. The same way I wrote about Greek and Roman drama and all the other things I had to write about when I was in graduate school. Research, including practical experience testing products myself where I can, and asking other people about their experiences.

Actually, after two years of writing about something, you do have a background in it. But you don’t have to be an Ur-Guru to say “If it’s important, back it up.” You don’t have to be a geek to be able to back up, either. There are plenty of no-brainer backup solutions (though they tend to cost more than the ones which require more thought and work). In other words, for all the excuses people make, there’s no excuse.

David Pogue has promised to tell us all about his DriveSavers experience in his next column. For his sake, I hope he gets his Outlook data back. Even if he does, the lesson he’s learned about what he needs to back up is an expensive one. I’m sure he’ll remember it, but I don’t recommend you follow his example. Learn from it instead.

You can read and comment on the full NYT article, but go make your backups first.

What is the Sound of One Drive Failing?

Sometimes when your computer crashes and won't reboot, it's essentially a software issue, and all you need to do is reformat your drive. But sometimes your drive has literally crashed, meaning one or more parts has come loose and is chewing its way through the rest.

How do you know which is which? If it's a hardware problem, the drive will almost always make strange noises. If you've never had the misfortune to hear them coming out of your own computer, you can listen to the recordings on DataRecoveryNet. If you do hear any of these sounds coming from your own computer, turn it off immediately to minimize the damage to the drive. And you'd better hope the drive is still under warranty, because you're going to need a new one, on top of paying the fees for data recovery if you don't have a recent enough backup.

Disaster Recovery Nightmare Contest—Win UltraBac Disaster Recovery Pro

Windows IT Pro wants to hear your data recovery horror stories, so they're sponsoring a contest. If you've backed it up but couldn't recover it, fill out their survey. The best (or is it worst?) story wins a copy of UltraBac's Disaster Recovery Pro Standalone Server software ($695 value). Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2005. The winner will be notified by April 20, 2005.

Don't let Tech Support nuke your data!

Along with other horror stories in his "Customer Support Nightmares" feature, CNET's Dan Tynan warns us that tech support staff can put your data in danger by telling you to reformat your hard drive without telling you that you need to back it up first. As I write this, sixteen readers have weighed in with their preferences for backup solutions and their experiences of wiped-out drives.