Boot drive fails AGAIN but saved by paranoia

[David Sutton]

Last Sunday the desktop computer failed to boot and the boot drive disappeared from the menu. I started to hear Seth Resnick's voice from “Where the bleep are my pictures?”: This is not good.
Monday a trip into the shop, and yes, the boot drive is dead. As they replaced it with a different model they commented “We've had a lot of trouble with these. Are your photos on this second drive? It's the same type and could fail any moment”. This is not good.
Well the drive this one replaced had failed last April (after some 6 months of use) and it took at least three solid days to reinstall and re-activate everything. I have most Windows XP services either disabled or set to manual start so the machine runs faster. Also a lot of customising which I felt put it well ahead of Vista. I was able to recreate the set up last time because my old travel laptop had XP pro and  the same set up and I just copied my settings and programs over. Now this laptop has been lent out to someone currently overseas. And anyway its graphics card has failed. This is not good.
After the last failure paranoia set in and I mirrored the C  drive onto my scratch disk using free Paragon software from a magazine. And synched application data, files and photos onto a 1tb drive which lives in my safe.  And archived my photos off site and printed out my passwords. And purchased and ran Acronis drive image software.
All right. No panic. So I loaded in the Acronis boot cd. The backup has gone.  This is not good.
Loaded in the Paragon boot disk. There is no help file or support as it's freeware. This is not good.
Finally after much messing around got my computer back the way it was in April. Phew. Just need to copy over the application data to bring it to where I was last month.
While doing so what do I find but the Acronis backup. Of course. Silly me. I'm a Canon user. Naturally  a vital file would be hidden away in a sub- sub- menu before locking it in a safe. (Bangs head on desk slowly and methodically). Well the Acronis software works brilliantly. Put in the boot disk, set the computer to boot from CD-Rom and follow the clear instructions. Ten minutes later I'm looking at my screen as it was four weeks ago. Lost three weeks' emails, but otherwise I think I'll be okay.
Lesson for me is:
1)Have two programs for drive imaging. You don't know for sure if they will actually work when you need them.
2)Archive at least one drive image. What if my scratch disk containing the drive image got taken out when the C drive failed?
3)Sync my application data weekly not monthly.
4)Archive application data every so often as well as photos. I'll do this by taking my laptop and backup drive to the place where my archive lives, and doing the sync there. What if I've got my backup and archive connected to the computer at home and it gets struck by lightning? You can't be too paranoid.
5)Make notes about exactly where my drive images live. Maybe store the notes in a sub- sub- folder in my other desk. Sigh.
The thing I haven't got sorted is software for checking the integrity of the back ups. Have they been copied correctly? I hope so.
David

[DarkPenguin]

1)Have two programs for drive imaging. You don't know for sure if they will actually work when you need them.

Another way of putting that would be test your backups.  If you haven't restored from a backup you don't know that you can.

That is one issue with drive imaging software.  You need an extra disk to know if it worked.  Paranoia has left me with a lot of extra disks so this isn't much of an issue.  (More of an issue these days.  I miss compusa's insane rebates.  You could walk in the store and have a huge drive for $60 after rebate.)

[David Sutton]

Another way of putting that would be test your backups.  If you haven't restored from a backup you don't know that you can.

Agree completely. But paranoia has left me unwilling to test anything on a working computer in case I break it. I suppose I could get an old one for that purpose....

[David Sutton]

Another way of putting that would be test your backups.  If you haven't restored from a backup you don't know that you can.

Sometimes I'm not the brightest light on the Christmas tree. Just realised, if I'm worried about testing a backup, just do what I did on the re-install. Disconnect all the other drives.

[Plekto]

I'd also add - absolutely run RAID 1 or some sort of redundancy.

Consider - the best real world estimates state that a hard drive has a roughly 1/500 chance of failing per day - be it getting corrupted, mechanical failures, or the chipset/circuit board(this is actual repair and RMA rates).  This isn't so awful, though, and we live with it.   Many people get 2-3x that before a major problem happens.

But the chance of a RAID 1 set going out at once is ~1:250,000.  And even then you have two entire copies to recover from as well.  Also, the chances of both failing in an identical way at once is nearly 0.   The trick as well is to use as small of a drive for the boot volume as well.  I use 2 160GB drives and it gives me a ~2 hour rebuild time.  This means a quick turnaround time as well as lower cost.(plus data recovery firms charge per MB for the entire drive - ouch)

Since every motherboard now supports it, and drives are dirt cheap, it's a no-brainer.  

Now - major file storage is a whole other option.  I'm a fan of bluy-ray for physical backups.  They appear to be stable up to 10 years in the worst reasonable case and that's long enough as far as I'm concerned.