Yes, that is the lesson I learned after my recent 1 TB external hard drive crash. I bought this Seagate FreeAgent Pro external drive couple of years back thinking that I am buying “peace of mind” for my personal data storage & backups. I guess I was totally wrong. Lately I started seeing some hiccups on this drive and it finally crashed with bad sectors.
I have 5 years warranty on this drive. I called the manufacturer and talked to them about my case. They are ready to replace the drive, obviously not the data. So, what is gonna happen to my almost 1 TB worth of data? I started looking up online to see how I can rescue data from this drive. I tried many of Windows & Linux based tools. But, none of them helped me recover any data at all. I guess, the drive is damaged heavily and none of the recovery tools could do any good.
Here are some of the things to consider…
If I am going to have a backup/external drive, I would go for RAID based drives, preferably with RAID 1 or RAID 5 settings. And, I need to pro-actively perform periodic health checks on the external drives just to make sure its not gonna have heart attack or brain damage soon. May be it’s not a good idea to go for a huge capacity like >= 2 TB in a single drive, because of limitations on hardware storage machanism working within a confined physical limits.
In this digital world of inexpensive electronics & technologies, we trust so much on them in our day to day life. At some point in time, what we have in those are worth much more than 1’s and 0’s to us, personally.
Hi Siddique,
Sad to hear about your experience. I too recently bought 1TB Seagate FreeAgent HDD recently and now after reading your article, I am thinking of buying my second one to have a double backup of some sort. May be burning DVDs for important stuff periodically is good idea instead of having two HDDs. I concur that we put way too much important stuff in 1’s and 0’s these days and if the technology remains shaky then we’re just setting ourselves up for a big disappointment sooner or later. Thanks for sharing your experience, it’ll surely make many others like me aware of gotchas around seemingly ‘proven’ n ‘trusted’ technologies…
Thanks,
hope things are fine otherwise in your life… wish u the best!
Umesh
ps: remember me?!
Hey Umesh,
How are you buddy? Hope things are going great at your end.
Ironically, after this incident, my primary desktop’s hard drive partition disappeared out of thin air. I am working on some strategy/setup where you can seamlessly boot into a secondary hard drive (mirrored version of the original one) when the primary hard drive fails. I’ll share my experience to everyone once I get that figured out
Cheers,
The ideal solution for me is cloud backup. If every night I could autosync some of my data to the cloud, it’d give me the most peace of mind.
Lacking that, the most I do right now is storing my most important files on two separate hard drives and manually sync once a while. Sometimes paranoia saves you big.