# Disk failure



## erwinbel (Mar 23, 2010)

Folks, 

I just had a 1 year old 2TB Iomega MiniMax fail on me. I use this to store my music. It is connected via USB to a 2009 Mac mini. I backupped only on August 27. The five days after that, I had been very busy adding over 100 albums and moving some stuff from the internal HHD on the mini to this external Iomega. So busy I decided to backup when I was done. Performance was a bit sluggish, so I did a restart before I was going to backup. Bad idea! Iomeag was no longer visible. The info screen said "not formatted". When I formatted, it refused duty anyway, so I took it in, where the tech guy affirmed the fault. BUMMER! Was just past 3,000 albums.

While I do what's necessary to have it repared/replaced under warranty, I decided to buy the 3TB Iomega Mac Companion since I have 1,6 TB anyway, so 2TB wasn't going to cope much longer.

The moral of the story is: backup more often! The trouble is, my Onnto 4-bay (4.5TB RAID-5) is far from silent, that's why I only did backup about once a week. I lost about 100 albums, no biggie. 

I have read a good tip today in a German mag (Digital HIFI): if you use a mirrored (2-bay) storage device, such as a NAS, get a third HDD and put that in. Swap it every month or so. Now you got a third storage, which you can keep safe in another space.


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## Guest (Sep 9, 2011)

I know digital music is the most popular, but the reason of failure is why I personal backed away from it. I know hard media takes up storage space, but I still have disk from 20+ years ago. I've changed computers who knows how many times, lost a few disk along the way, and at once point, I lost all my digital music. I still know where the very first CD I got is. I guess I just don't like babysitting my digital media.

I guess I'm just too old school. I just hope CDs, SACDs, and Vinyl records are still available for years to come. Oddly enough, I'm more about digital TVs shows and movies, but for some reason, still like having physical media for music.

Not only should people back up important data, but also set restore points in Windows, if you are using Windows. I think Mac has something like that, but I forget what it is called. Oddly enough, I never do this as well. For me, it is a good reason to just reload the OS if it is that messed up.


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## koyaan (Mar 2, 2010)

Digital storage of media may be all the rage, but I'm afraid the technology simply isn't robust enough to make it reliable as your primary media source. Keeping my discs.


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## Guest (Sep 10, 2011)

koyaan said:


> Digital storage of media may be all the rage, but I'm afraid the technology simply isn't robust enough to make it reliable as your primary media source. Keeping my discs.


I agree. I guess for the hard core guys, they can throw enough cash at it to protect all their data. Services like icloud to back everything up and clone to all devices. At the end of the day, after spending all the money on equipment, services, one could easily get a really nice player. For digital TV shows, it wouldn't be the end of the world if I lost them. I rarely ever watch them twice anyway. Aside from a top gear collection, I don't really collect anything digitally. Give me media I can hold.


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## eugovector (Sep 4, 2006)

I have to disagree. With a simple 321 solution (3 copies, 2 offsite, 1 in the cloud), all your data can be safe with a hard disk enclosure ($30) and a cloud backup system ($5/month). The trick is, you actually have to backup regularly, and that's where most folks fail. I'll admit that even I haven't put my music in the could, though my other truly irreplaceable and important data is. Still, my portable hard drive gets its monthly clone from my main server without fail.

LPs scratch, CDs break down (especially burned CDs). We are in the golden age of media. Finally our media can survive a house fire, and even outlive us.


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## erwinbel (Mar 23, 2010)

Well, I was just about to jump in the car to get the mini back with the new 3TB HDD Iomega. But I had asked them yesterday to start up iTunes and check if it's working allright. Got a call back just moments ago: "Nope", there are "some" tunes not found. they are attempting a fix, a new backup from the Onnto. So no music this weekend...

I have to look into getting a better sollution for this.


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## Guest (Sep 10, 2011)

eugovector said:


> I have to disagree. With a simple 321 solution (3 copies, 2 offsite, 1 in the cloud), all your data can be safe with a hard disk enclosure ($30) and a cloud backup system ($5/month). The trick is, you actually have to backup regularly, and that's where most folks fail. I'll admit that even I haven't put my music in the could, though my other truly irreplaceable and important data is. Still, my portable hard drive gets its monthly clone from my main server without fail.
> 
> LPs scratch, CDs break down (especially burned CDs). We are in the golden age of media. Finally our media can survive a house fire, and even outlive us.


It's those cloud services that add up. Only $5 a month. That's $60 a year. It doesn't sound like much, but over the years it will add up to the cost of a quality player. You say LPs scratch and CDs break down, but LPs only scratch if they are not taken care of. They aren't that fragile and nothing but playing them in real time can produce the sound they make. Right or wrong, I don't want to start a digital vs analog war, but their sound is unique and a record actually needs to be played to sound like a record. It is true that some of the first produced CDs could break down, any modern pressed CD should never break down . I'm not really trying to argue, but I've had way more hard drive failures. A hard disk inclosure might only be $30, but a quality hard drive is not cheap. I've even seen external western digital drives fail and ones that were less then a year old. A more safe option would be something like this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822501020

The cheap hard drives on the market are a ticking time bomb. I use them, but I don't rely on them. For my main desktop I got a WD carver black to try and avoid the drives that have more known failures. Again, it all comes down to babysitting a media collection. I guess it's possible that everything could burn down, but I have insurance to cover it and everything else I own is actually pretty cheap.

I think the one place digital audio is actually best is in a car. It's safer and easier to change music, and the CD-R disk do wear out and break down from the heat and cold. I still use disk at the moment, but I want to get the alpine ext adapter and a player.


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## erwinbel (Mar 23, 2010)

Yeah, I try to avoid subscriptions too, if I can help it.

Agree that the car is where most CD's get damaged. My car is 8 years old, so no such modernities as iPod connection or so. It can be installed, but at the expense of the 6-CD loader connection. I just change the CD's in the loader about every 2 months or so. I don't use the single CD in the dashboard. I listen to the FM radio most of the time anyway. If the commercials annoy me, I swap to the 6CD loader. 

About radio: it all depends where you live if you got good stations. We drove to Venice (I) from Belgium in July (about 900 miles). In Belgium, we have Studio Brussel, which is very good, it's the kind of music you would hear on Glastonburry. In Germany, all is well too, no problem to find a good station. But as far as France, Austria an most of all, Italy are concerned: worthless FM band!


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## koyaan (Mar 2, 2010)

Please don't think the dirth of good radio is limited to Europe. Here in North Carolina we have a very good Classical station, WCPE. Beyond that there is NOTHING worth listening to.


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## Sevenfeet (Feb 2, 2009)

$60 a year is cheap compared to the alternative. First, what price is your data? Your financial data? Your kids' birthday pictures? Your music and movies? Is it worth a Big Mac extra value meal a month? Virtually all of us would say yes. I also agree that data isn't real unless it's in three places, with one either offsite or in the cloud.

Even a simple backup is better than nothing at all. For all the family and friends I do Mac support for, I demand they all buy a Time Capsule. It's simple, it works and is easy to understand. The first friend to buy a Time Capsule for their Macbook when they were a new appliance would up having to recover their data off of it when their Macbook's hard drive crashed TWO DAYS LATER. They lost nothing. All of a sudden, $299 for the Time Capsule was really cheap, and this was after they lost all of their data on a PC a year earlier (including the first year of pictures of their first born son).

Data is precious and VERY FRAGILE. Make as many copies as you can, preferably at least three.


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## erwinbel (Mar 23, 2010)

Sevenfeet said:


> $60 a year is cheap compared to the alternative. First, what price is your data? Your financial data? Your kids' birthday pictures? Your music and movies? Is it worth a Big Mac extra value meal a month? Virtually all of us would say yes. I also agree that data isn't real unless it's in three places, with one either offsite or in the cloud.
> 
> Even a simple backup is better than nothing at all. For all the family and friends I do Mac support for, I demand they all buy a Time Capsule. It's simple, it works and is easy to understand. The first friend to buy a Time Capsule for their Macbook when they were a new appliance would up having to recover their data off of it when their Macbook's hard drive crashed TWO DAYS LATER. They lost nothing. All of a sudden, $299 for the Time Capsule was really cheap, and this was after they lost all of their data on a PC a year earlier (including the first year of pictures of their first born son).
> 
> Data is precious and VERY FRAGILE. Make as many copies as you can, preferably at least three.


It's hte second time I need Time machine.

First time was a year or two ago. I completely messed up a Vectorworks CAD drawing on this iMac because I imported a Autocad drawing and missed on the scaling issue (VW uses scales, Autocad not). I swiftly could save a week worth of time simply by going back 2 hours in Time Machine. Few!

This time though, it's not that simple with the disk failure on my external Iomega. Time Machine recovers the music files all right, but iTunes needs to be freshly reinstalled, hence I loose my playlists. I will update a report as soon as I got it back from the tech.


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## eugovector (Sep 4, 2006)

Gotta love iTunes...easily the most overly complicated and unnecessarily arbitrary software out there.

For those wondering, I use syncback to selectively copy important files (including music and irreplacable pictures) from my main drive to a second installed in the same computer. I have an auto backup every two weeks. From there, a do a monthly copy to a portable hard drive which live off site. 2TB internal HD ($90), 1 TB external ($85). Pretty inexpensive peace of mind considering irreplaceable photos and rare music.

For the truely irreplacable and minute-critical files, I simply work in a dropbox folder. Dropbox saves a revision history of all files for 30 days, so if you save the incorrect version or accidentally delete it, a quick right click or trip to the website from any computer is all you need to retrieve your file. Roll in remote access and public linking for large files and it is the one piece of software I could not live without. And your first 2GB is free, plus all sorts of free bonus space by completing contests and spreading the word to help other folks sign up (yes, I'd love for you to sign up for dropbox using my link, but everything I've said is still true): http://db.tt/hcwqK3v

If you simply want cloud backup for a catastrophic situation, I like carbonite but don't use it currently.


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## Sevenfeet (Feb 2, 2009)

eugovector said:


> Gotta love iTunes...easily the most overly complicated and unnecessarily arbitrary software out there.


It's also one of the oldest applications in continuous development for the modern Mac, save Mac OS X itself. I'm expecting Apple to overhaul it eventually, but the problem is that iTunes is not just a music program. it does movies, TV shows, podcasts and a bunch of other things. And now it's the portal to the huge iTunes store which is not a trivial thing to interface to. After a decade, I'm amazed it works as well as it does.



> For those wondering, I use syncback to selectively copy important files (including music and irreplacable pictures) from my main drive to a second installed in the same computer. I have an auto backup every two weeks. From there, a do a monthly copy to a portable hard drive which live off site. 2TB internal HD ($90), 1 TB external ($85). Pretty inexpensive peace of mind considering irreplaceable photos and rare music.
> 
> For the truely irreplacable and minute-critical files, I simply work in a dropbox folder. Dropbox saves a revision history of all files for 30 days, so if you save the incorrect version or accidentally delete it, a quick right click or trip to the website from any computer is all you need to retrieve your file. Roll in remote access and public linking for large files and it is the one piece of software I could not live without. And your first 2GB is free, plus all sorts of free bonus space by completing contests and spreading the word to help other folks sign up (yes, I'd love for you to sign up for dropbox using my link, but everything I've said is still true): http://db.tt/hcwqK3v
> 
> If you simply want cloud backup for a catastrophic situation, I like carbonite but don't use it currently.


The lesson here is to use something to back up that works automatically so you won't have to worry about it. Be that Dropbox, Time Machine, Carbonite, Mozy...whatever. Any of these solutions is better than losing your data.


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## Sevenfeet (Feb 2, 2009)

erwinbel said:


> It's hte second time I need Time machine.
> 
> First time was a year or two ago. I completely messed up a Vectorworks CAD drawing on this iMac because I imported a Autocad drawing and missed on the scaling issue (VW uses scales, Autocad not). I swiftly could save a week worth of time simply by going back 2 hours in Time Machine. Few!
> 
> This time though, it's not that simple with the disk failure on my external Iomega. Time Machine recovers the music files all right, but iTunes needs to be freshly reinstalled, hence I loose my playlists. I will update a report as soon as I got it back from the tech.


You can restore the playlists too. It's just an XML file in the main iTunes directory in your Music folder. Just restore the whole folder to make it simple.


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## jarrod1937 (Oct 26, 2008)

I just do raid 10 setups. You can have 2 hard drives die in the raid array and still have all of your data, and you get a performance boost as well! Most raid software (for good controllers) come with software that will email you if a drive dies causing the array to be degraded. Simply pop in a new drive and let the array rebuild in the background.
Though, i'd say periodic backups (incremental whole drive imaging) is still something you should do. I've yet to have it happen to me personally, but if the controller for the raid goes bad it may corrupt any file you try to write to within that period.


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