Comments for Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

Comment from Norm on 2010-07-28

2010-07-28T14:28:31Z

Used Acronis True Image Home 2010 on W7 though seemed to require a backup USB drive of the same size to work bcronis propriety does not like Linux so would not clone the Fedora small boot partition and took many hours to clone the rest. So bought and installed Farstone Total Recovery Pro. This exactly clones all BUT 23hrs to do a !TB.

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Comment from Britti on 2010-06-08

2010-06-08T10:08:37Z

Thanks for reminding me to always backup my files.With hard drives.They can crash any time and thus data can be lost.With me i opted for an online backup called safecopy online backup.I store all the backups in need with safecopy because of the efficient services they offer.

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Comment from Dean Simes on 2010-03-31

2010-04-01T03:15:01Z

Re doing a nightly backup of the entire hard disk - I am puzzled as why this is better than monthly image and daily incremental, which I understood was your previos practice. I had thought that the OS would not change during the month (except for the interim updates) and that there may be some new applications, but that incremental updating would catch all of these. Apparently I am missing something here - but I am very much a learner.

My nightly backup is incremental, and I do a monthly full.

01-Apr-2010

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Comment from Dan on 2010-03-28

2010-03-28T08:23:14Z

Yes, that hard drive will fail. But I don't bother backing up my OS. I use Fedora Core, and update the entire OS with every release of FC, about every six months. I keep all my non-OS data on an external drive, and back that up daily. My OS is running on a 30GB drive. I have no need for a huge internal drive.

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Comment from Don Beal on 2010-03-24

2010-03-25T00:35:13Z

I have a Panasonic CF-W2 "Toughbook" that I had to install an additional 512 RAM into just to get it to perform reasonably.
I admit it was a couple of years old and I bought it used.
I have replaced the Hard drive twice (professionals did it)but it crashed again less than a year later.
Now no one locally wants to tackle putting in a new hard drive and no one seems to know if it may not be the Motherboard.
Panasonic will "look at it for $57.00 if I ship it to them but it is probably good money after bad.
This thing never did what it was supposed to and I think it cost somebody
@ $3800 NEW!

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Comment from sirpaul1 on 2010-03-23

2010-03-23T20:51:33Z

I guess you have to take into consideration the make and model of the hard drive.
I have had 100% reliability with Maxtor (now Seagate) and Western Digital (10+ years on those 4).
I've had 0% reliability with 2 Samsung drives (both died within a year) and a pre-Maxtor Seagate (it died in about 6 months).

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Comment from Glenn P. on 2010-03-23

2010-03-23T20:49:13Z

Ah, Terabyte! Thanks for mentioning that, GL -- that's what I use: BootItNG! Works like the proverbial charm! :)

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Comment from GL on 2010-03-21

2010-03-21T22:33:49Z

To the 1,2,3,4 "Robin Clay" person above, you are missing quite a few very important details about backing-up your work. You're not interested in drive-image backups? There is no other way to avoid spending two weeks rebuilding an entire configuration from scratch. Professional drive-image backup software will exclude large pagefile.sys type occurrences as an option. Windows does not "need" pagefile.sys to recover. Check out TERABYTE UNLIMITED on the web, their product also provides an incremental drive-image option but full drive images are what protect against loss of months/years of configuration time.

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Richard on 2009-07-15

2009-07-15T20:40:14Z

I've got a whole pile of sub GB disks, in the 80MB - 800MB range, disks that will most likely still be running when all of my 250GB & up disks are dead.

there's something to be said about the older slower speed drives!

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Comment from Robin Clay on 2009-07-14

2009-07-14T19:14:23Z

1. The world population is divided into two categories of people - those who have had a hard drive crash, and those who haven't - yet.

2. There is a theory that it is actually kinder to the hard drive to keep it running, so that it never gets cold - most wear occurs on cold start-up. No, I turn mine off....

3. "Full" back-up is all very well, but.... what I really REALLY want is to be able to do an incremental back-up, i.e. only back up those files that have changed. AND what *I* would like is for the program actually to re-name files that already exist on the back-up drive by adding the time-stamp, so that they are not overwritten.... NOT a lot to ask, but it's "not out there"- well, I haven't found it yet....

4. No, I'm not interested in backing-up the "pagefile.sys" file, etc. (not that one can under Windows, anyway), but presumably a "full image" backup would include them ? If not, it ain't a "full image"....

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Comment from JH on 2009-07-08

2009-07-08T09:21:07Z

If the HDD is continually spooling up and down, its mechanical components will be worn out faster. My last HDD lasted 10 years and is still working.

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Comment from Serge on 2009-02-08

2009-02-08T21:50:20Z

S.M.A.R.T technology uses threshold values to estimate the health status of a hard disk. The estimation of a failing date is like a trend estimation on how attribute value will change based on past values, it's just a statistical algorithm.

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Comment from Darius Dinshah on 2009-01-22

2009-01-22T20:38:53Z

All the comments refer to stopping an external drive. There was a reference to the internal drive always spinning when the PC is running. Not so. In the "Power" pull-down you can set the internal to shut down after any number of minutes or never if you wish. Much data being entered appears to go to another place, either RAM or maybe a cache. When needed, the indicator LED shows the internal being reactivated, and then writes to it. It may not save much elec, but would it not extend bearing life?

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from berny marsden on 2009-01-19

2009-01-19T18:04:54Z

I teach computer maintenance, & I always stress that the reason for making backups is NOT "in case your hard drive fails" because I can guarantee that one day it WILL fail & that day could be as soon as the day after you bought the pc. If you change your mindset to "backup for WHEN it fails" you are much more likely to do regular backups. Incidentally, I can recommend DriveImage XML for "hot" system drive backups. I used to use PowerQuest DriveImage (no connection) but it was always breaking after MS system updates. The XML version has been rock solid.

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Vicki Williams on 2007-12-29

2007-12-29T12:42:17Z

I've had one failure in the 15-20 years that I have owned a computer. That drive did fail during its first year.

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Ken Crook on 2007-03-31

2007-04-01T05:51:09Z

Bought a new HP Pavilion notebook and the hard disk died after only 5 months of use. HP shipped me a new one, but I wasted 3 days rebuilding everything. I now, as Leo, use Acronis TrueImage to backup my hard disk so next time my disk crashes or is trashed I'll save those wasted 3 days.

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Ann E. Hynes on 2007-03-31

2007-04-01T03:09:13Z

I just listened to the podcast on hard drive failure. Expensive, yes,to the tune of about $465. I wish I had known this sooner. Thank you for your newsletter. I'll keep reading!

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Gideon on 2007-03-30

2007-03-31T06:39:05Z

I think Google probably runs their hard discs pretty hard that way they get a better ROI. I doubt any of us are running HDs 24/7. From a HDs point of view you could easily think of 2 years work at Google being the equivalent of 5 years in a home or office environment.

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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Comment from Michael Horowitz on 2007-03-30

2007-03-31T04:03:12Z

Acronis True Image can make image backups either from within Windows or outside Windows running from a bootable CD. I would only trust an image backup made from outside Windows, but that's me. The entire True Image v8 manual however was geared to backups from within Windows.

Recently I tried to make True Image backups from a boot CD on a machine without a PS/2 port. Despite being Linux, both v7 and v8 failed to detect the USB keyboard.

But my biggest gripe with True Image is that it can not make a true image. That is, it is incapable of doing the basic job of an imaging product, make a sector by sector copy. For details see http://www.computergripes.com/trueimage.html

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Comment from Gerald Malcolm on 2007-03-30

2007-03-31T02:09:47Z

7%-- I have had # failures in the last ywar. one only lasted 4 months--i back up full all the time.

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Comment from Louis Benn on 2007-03-26

2007-03-26T10:58:43Z

7%? That is Much higher than we have, we've been lucky i guess.
1 failure in 3 years. :)

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A comment on: Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

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