I’d been meaning to write about this little story for a while but totally forgot about it up until now. With this long simulation running in the background, it looks like I have an ideal opportunity.

Anyway. Was back home a couple of weeks ago to do some task that I can’t remember, and went to turn on the PC to the lovely sound of click click click hum *pause* click click…

Now, I’ve worked on enough machines to know that any kind of clicking sound is a very bad thing — usually indicative of imminent, unrecoverable hard-drive failure. At this point, I had a major heart attack since that drive had about 40GB of tagged, organized, irreplaceable and unfortuntely, not-backed-up photos.

At this point you’re probably screaming at the screen asking how I could have been so stupid. In some vein effort to make myself look like less of a dumbass than I actually am, here’s a brief justification for my actions:

1. The drive had been working fine with no errors for almost four years (yes, I know, this isn’t a good reason… in fact it’s probably not even an excuse!)
2. My motherboard’s SATA ports are both full and I don’t want to buy an IDE drive.
3. At the time, I was waiting for Apple to announce a new Mac Pro so that I’d have a PC in Coventry.

So after the heart attack, I ripped the drive out of the PC, mounted it in a caddy and ran GetDataBack, which is an excellent piece of data recovery software. All of the important data (including all of the photos and the Lightroom library) was fine, thankfully.

Now I’m considering backup options. Really I want it to be network-accessible, about 3-4TB and backed up. So far, the most likely candidate is a self-built PC with software RAID-5 with 3x1TB drives. Anyone else out there got any suggestions for a good backup system?

5:56 pm | Posted in Computing, Linux No Comments »