Jeff2003 Posted July 12, 2005 Report Share Posted July 12, 2005 Hi, I experienced another external hard drive failure last night when trying to access the hard drive to perform a backup. I posted several months ago about a similar failure. I am using Retrospect 6.5 on a WinXP SP2 system. The hard drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax ATA drive located in a USB 2.0/FireWire enclosure. I had been performing a normal back 6 nights a week, and a recycle backup once a week. I am performing this as a file type backup. When the previous drive failed (an IOGear external drive (not sure of the specific hard drive manufacturer)), I posted a message here questioning the way the drive was being worked during the backup. I can understand the amount of drive activity during the recycle backup; but, it doesn't make much sense to me for the normal backups. The only reply I received suggested using a disk backup instead of a file backup because of the way it is processed. Would this really make a difference with the concern I have? After losing two different drives in less than 6 months, you might say I don't have much confidence that my backup will be any good should one of the systems drives (set up on Raid 0) ever crash. Does anyone else have experience with this kind of failure? Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided. Jeff Bennett Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted July 12, 2005 Report Share Posted July 12, 2005 I've never seen much point is using a file backup. I've been using a disk backup to external USB drives for 2+years with Retrospect (now 6.5). Set the backup drive(s) to use NTFS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jelenko Posted July 13, 2005 Report Share Posted July 13, 2005 Quote: I've never seen much point is using a file backup. I've been using a disk backup to external USB drives for 2+years with Retrospect (now 6.5). Right. But any disk can fail. The only difference with an external one is that it's failure is essentially independent of any main system failure. IMO, until you're using CD/DVD/Tape, you're not really protected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jelenko Posted July 13, 2005 Report Share Posted July 13, 2005 Quote: Hi, I experienced another external hard drive failure last night when trying to access the hard drive to perform a backup. After losing two different drives in less than 6 months, you might say I don't have much confidence that my backup will be any good should one of the systems drives (set up on Raid 0) ever crash. Does anyone else have experience with this kind of failure? Jeff Bennett Jeff - Your experience is a great example why you should use removable storage media - i.e., CD/DVD/Tape. Personally, I like CD/DVD over tape. Tape requires a cartridge to mechanically handle the tape itself - CD's/DVD's don't require any special handling. As far as the two USB drives failing, first guess would be heat, second would be power spikes. It's also possible it's bad luck - hard drives do die. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted July 13, 2005 Report Share Posted July 13, 2005 USB drives are removeable and far more reliable than CD/DVD/tape, not to mention being more economical for a desktop system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jelenko Posted July 14, 2005 Report Share Posted July 14, 2005 Quote: USB drives are removeable and far more reliable than CD/DVD/tape, not to mention being more economical for a desktop system. Howard - In what way would a hard drive be more reliable than a CD/DVD? Hard drives fail on the order of years, CD/DVD's fail on the order of decades. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff2003 Posted August 6, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 6, 2005 Thanks to both of you for responding to my post. I see both of your points. The bottom line is that I'm still uncomfortable with my backup routine, but, I'm not sure what I should do about it. I don't disagree with jelenko that CD or DVD is a good way to go from a longevity standpoint. However, I wonder if with the amount of use the CD or DVD burner would get doing nightly backups wouldn't cause the drive hardware to fail, too, more quickly than with normal (non-backup) use. I have also begun using the disk backup format, rather than file backup, as suggested by Howard. Maybe this goes back to my backup strategy. I perform a recycle backup one night each week, and a normal backup every other night of the week. I am backing everything on the Raid 0 configuration on my system. I am backing up about 80 GB of data. The external drive I am presently using has capability for both FireWire and USB 2.0. I have tried both. The fact is, I lost another hard drive a week ago. (This makes three failures in several months.) The failures have been in two different external drive enclosures using two different hard drive manuafacturers. This morning I was up early and became increasingly concerned as I listened to the mechanical noise as the drive wrote data during its recycle backup. (During the compare the drive was almost silent.) I do periodic image backups to DVDs, so there is some protection in that form. I am just trying to follow the best plan possible in order to make sure that daily backups will be available should there ever be a problem. I have used tapes before, but because of the amount of data that is on my system, I would either need to be available to change the tapes during backup, or I would need a tape changer. (I'm not prepared to make that expenditure.) And if I backup to DVD, I have the same problem with recycle backups. Any ideas? Thanks Jeff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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