plan for when hard drive crases

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heretolearn

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My laptop computer overheats (or gets hot to the touch). What are some preparation steps I can take in the event of a harddrive crash. Is there an external/internal drive that you can suggest I get along with the appropriate software to backup the entire contents of the drive? Preferably something that gives the option of backing up the entire drive every 1 or 2 weeks and a drive that I can use to boot up from in case the hard drive fails. My laptop has a firewire port and usb ports.
 
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I do have a few external hard drives (7).

I only go with brand names ( WD - HP - Maxtor )

My favorite is the small 320 GB WD

I also have another small WD 250 GB ( I bought it at Costco for less than $100)
 
'...I can only advise regarding a Macintosh computer.

The latest Operating System 10.5.4 and several earlier editions have a utility called 'Time Machine'. If you connect an external hard drive, it will back up the total content of your internal hard drive automatically. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups until your backup disk is full.

I have just purchased a 500 GB external hard drive which is the largest I have, although I have several 300 GB. I was going to purchase the 1 terabyte version as it is only a few dollars more expensive but, although not logical, I would be very unhappy to lose that amount of saved information, images, movies etc., if it ever failed.

I am sure there will be a similar system available for Windows users and if so, there will be someone here who can advise you'.

I also came across a new 'gadget' which resembles an electric shaver charger. It sits on your desk and is connected to your computer by USB and you can slot any hard drive into it either 2.0 or 3.5 to use the contents. It will only work with SATA hard drives but now you can easily connect and disconnect multiple hard drives on the fly without having to have them installed in hard drive cases.

themagician
 
Get an external hard drive and then find a good backup program on sourceforge for free.
 
voxclan said:
I do have a few external hard drives (7).

I only go with brand names ( WD - HP - Maxtor )

My favorite is the small 320 GB WD

I also have another small WD 250 GB ( I bought it at Costco for less than $100)
Click to expand...


WD is the best!
 
Get a copy of Acronis True Image and backup everything to DVD(s). In case it crashes, just pop in the Acronis Emergency Boot CD/DVD and it will let you restore everything back to the last saved point -- even on a new hard drive (after you format it). It's a lot like Norton Ghost, but you don't have to boot into DOS to use it.
 
Essential Clix said:
Get a copy of http://www.torrentportal.com/download/3446157/Acronis+True+Image+Home+v11.0.8101%2B%5BKeygen%5D.rar.torrent and backup everything to DVD(s). In case it crashes, just pop in the Acronis Emergency Boot CD/DVD and it will let you restore everything back to the last saved point -- even on a new hard drive (after you format it). It's a lot like Norton Ghost, but you don't have to boot into DOS to use it.
Click to expand...



Yah Acronis is tits.


By the way. I run my dell laptop all friggen day and I had problems with overheating in the past (with a different laptop). I highly suggest you get a laptop fan that goes under your computer.

http://www.amazon.com/Antec-NOTEBOOK-COOLER-USB-Powered-Notebook/dp/B0000BVYTV


That fan has been going strong for about a year now with no problems. My computer is very cool and the fan is pretty quiet. This might not work in all cases but I hook an external keyboard, mouse and monitor up to my laptop so it just kinda kicks it in the corner.

I highly suggest you get that fan if you are dealing with heat issues, it really works wonders. Also get urself another hard drive to back up your stuff every couple weeks.
 
I run my laptop 24/7 in the office, on the train and then at home. I have a fan to sit it on because it was getting really hot and I had already lost one hard drive. Since I got the fan, not a problem to be seen. I run diagnostics on the drive every now and again and get no warning's about heat.

I also do a complete back up to an external drive once and week and have and automated backup that runs at 3am every night to just back up those directories I KNOW I would be lost without the latest data - thos econtaining spreadsheets and whatever project I am working on.
 
DVDs (4.3GB) are old skool storage method... I am planning to backup my Data using Blu-Ray Discs (25GB)... I suggest you to do this too..
 
but can get expensive if you are backing up every week on blue-ray disks, dvds are just a cheap backup method.
 
If it crashes and the sector 0 is not damaged, then all you would need to do is get yourself a laptop hard drive reader that plugs through a USB port on a regular computer. The OS of the regular computer would read the data located on your laptop hd. That's a solution if it crashes.
 
lol, last time mine laptop hard drive died it was when I fell of the motorbike when it was in the saddle bags - no chance of ever saving that baby!
 
Another preventitive measure if your machine is overheating is to get a can of compressed air and blow all the crap out of the ventilation slots - where I live, there's lots of dust in the air and I need to do this at least once a week.
 
Invest in a raid 1 NAS . I have 8 computers at my house that backup all their goodies to the NAS. NAS is a network attached storage device. I have the 1tb model from buffalo. If one drive fails you don't lose data. I also backup the important goodies to a dedicated server.
 
Whatever backup approach you take, just make sure you can do full & incremental backups for ease of use & time and also that you can ftp the backups to an on-line filestore.

As well as local software, there's also on-line backup services such as 3w.carb*onite.c0m which is pretty cheap & no size limits ($49.95 per year).

3 keys to success:

1. Make sure you actually DO the backups :)
2. Get yourself organized so its a routine to do the backups, easy to find them, and so easy to restore them.
3. Do a test restore once in a while to check you know how to do it & that the files are being backed up OK. Better to find a problem before you really need the restore!

Finally, a classic 'backup' story from a looong time ago:

Small business owner contacts PC support engineer coz PC isn't working.
Engineer arrives & confirms needs to restore & asks small business owner if he's been taking backup copies.
SB Owner smiles proudly, confirms he's been doing them daily & asks his admin assistant to get the backup copies.
Admin assistant proudly returns with an A4 ring binder full of photocopies of floppy disks - one per page per day :) :)
 
Just in case you do NOT have a backup when a disk crashes:

If the disk still spins you have a pretty fair chance of recovering the data.
Tested many recovery apps a while ago and found GetDataBack one of the 2 best ones.

LOTS of these type of programs don't recover the file names or directory structure or they don't find shit. I tested quite a few (spend 3 or 4 days doing little else than trying to recover my data).

The problem is that if you run a recovery with several apps they don't tend to find the exact set of files. There will be a LARGE overlap of what they find but even the best 2 apps recovered slightly different stuff.

After you are done recovering you are then left to figure out which of the recovered files are corrupt.....

Better to make a backup in the first place, but if you did not, there IS good hope.

Have several crashed disks on my desk and they tend to all be maxtor :-(
 
If yore laptop is old I would suggest you put in parts and clean the dust out of the ventilators. That's the most common cause of overheating
 
I would suggest a two pronged approach:

1) Use some sort of external media or additional hard drive to restore quickly from a hardware failure.

2) If your computer/hard drive/backup is stolen or there is physical damage made to it you should have a remote backup of your system. I have a remote dedicated server that I use for this in which I use rsync over SSH to incrementally backup my system. Then the files are encrypted on the server. This might be a bit complex to setup so you may wish to consider online backup services which can be very cheap. I haven't tried any of these but here are some to consider: HP Upline, SOS Online Backup, MozyHome, and IDrive.
 
Using A External Drive Should Solve Your Problem.

Good Luck And Make Sure You Back That Thang Up Soon lol
 
I would say your best bet is to get an external HD of some sort, and then just buy a new Laptop hard drive and replace the bad one so you dont have to worry about it later. might as well get the bad part replaced because even if you do backup all the time, your still gonna be pissed when it goes down!!
 
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