What's your backup plan?
What's your backup plan?
What's your backup plan?
A Brief Rundown on Hard Drive failures:
Hard drives are one of the few remaining spinning parts in a computer system. That makes them more vunerable to the wear and tear associated with movement.
For a hard drive to store your data, there is a spindle spinning at between 5400rpm and 7200rpm (some drives spin even faster than that, but tend to be used in server applications). Attached to this spindle are multiple platters, which hold the data. We then have a little wand that moves over the face of each platter, at speed, to either write or read data. This wand sits at such a close distance to the spinning platter that any slight movement or bump can case the wand to hit' the platter face and cause damage both to the wand and the platter.
Anyway, once the data is read by the wand, it is translated into binary data via a logic board that sits on the outside of the hard drive. This logic board translates the data from the form it is in on the platter into something readable by a computer binary code. It then presents the computer with this binary code via an interface, be it Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, SCSI.
At its most basic, that is what a hard drive does.
Failues can occur in the following fashion:
Spindle error will not spin up due to connection problems with the power source, or has just seized. Considered high level problem.
Reader wand cannot read properly due to insufficient spacing most likely caused during bump or drop. Reader wand cannot move due to wand spindle being damaged. Reader wand cannot move due to extreme trauma and general physical association with the platter face.
Logic board failure missing/broken solder points, IC failure, pins failure, etc.
And that's just the physical ones.
Non Physical failures can occur with corruption being the prime suspect:
Soft level corruption occurs when the operating system or other programs required for startup find themselves not working correctly due to either registery problems, dll problems or other items. These can sometimes be fixed by reinstalling the operating system, or booting into safe mode and fixing the actual suspect file/entry.
At worst, the file is a highly needed file for startup, so you'll have to completely wipe the drive and reinstall. Most of the time, data is recoverable.
Hard level corruption occurs when there is failure at the platter level of the storage device. If the blocks on the platter are exposed to radiation, or a massive number of read/writes, even manufacture errors, or any other number of factors, then you find that you small changes in the data. These can be kept in hand by the operating system, which will monitor those and try to recover them periodically, but it can result in a bad block' when the system cannot recover from it.
If the bad block' occurs in the area of the drive that addresses your directory structure, then you have real problems, as your directories start disappearing, and their associated contents, which are addressed under them, appear not to be there.
So, the good news first: All of these scenarios above are recoverable!
With regard to soft and hard corruption, we here at Babeltech can do most of that on site, so it's covered by our standard fee. We actually think this is good news too
The bad news:
With regard to physical failures, we have a group that does that for us off site, but their fees range from $500-$5000 per drive.
So, if you were the smart one, you have that external drive working as an ACTUAL backup don't you?
If not, don't worry, there's another way.
We suggest looking at Mozy@Home, an offsite backup solution that uploads your important files, in the background, for US$4.95 a month. It's unlimited backup, and does it automatically in the background.
In fact, there's a special on at the moment simply click on the link below and enter the code "august" for our august 10%off special. That means for as little as US$4.40 a month, you no longer have to worry about backups.
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