# Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. ~~Update - The Sad Conclusion~~



## Mike Greene (May 5, 2012)

And no, I haven't backed up in ages. I am so screwed.

I have a 2GB Seagate Barracuda drive on my Mac. It's not my boot drive and not my sample drive. It's the third drive, which is what I use for Logic and ProTools projects. Including the ones I'm supposed to be working on *now.*

It doesn't get recognized any more by my computer. It makes sort of a gentle clicking sound (like a watch) on startup, but doesn't show up on the desktop after the computer is finished booting up. Same thing happens on a second Mac I tried. (By the way, the hard drive trays for newer Intel Macs are longer than first generation ones.)

If I run Disk Utility, it sees the drive, but doesn't give me the option of either Verify Disk or Repair Disk. It does ask if I'd like to initialize it, though. (Obviously I declined that.) Disk Utility identifies it as "3.9GB ST_M13FQBL Media" even though it's only a 2GB (1.9GB) drive. I suspect this means it knows a drive is there, but has no idea what it is.

I *have* to get stuff off this drive. It's been so long that I've used any recovery software that I have no idea which one to use. Seems it was once even recommended to rap an uncooperative drive with a hammer.

Any ideas? Am I gonna have to take this one of those hard drive rescue places? I hope not, because I really don't trust them.

*Edit - Update below. It's not a happy ending.*


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## Chriss Ons (May 5, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

The fact that your drive is displaying with the wrong information is symptomatic of a HD crash. It's also very likely that the ticking sound is caused by the arm on which the driveheads are mounted, as it moves back and forth in an attempt to touch the platter and read data. That would make this a so-called _drivehead crash_. The bad news is that this can actually _erase_ data from a disk. 
I might be wrong of course but if I were you, I wouldn't tamper with it myself.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2012)

I'd give Les Mannus in Glendale a call.

http://mancomacs.com/

He's The Guy. And he's the guy who got my office Mac working with a hammer rap after the '94 earthquake. He'll know what to do.


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## dannthr (May 5, 2012)

Best Case Scenario:

Your file allocation table is damaged or lost and only the file allocation table. The file allocation table is like an address book your computer uses to keep track of where stuff is on your hard-drive. If this is what has happened, then running a data recovery software (probably on another computer with an operating system that isn't going to block it out) may be able to reconstruct your files.

Worst Case Scenario:

The drive head is damaged or broken making horrible data scratches and damaging your data every time you turn power on to the drive. If the drive head is broken, the drive itself is useless. Only way to recover data at that stage would be to transplant the platters and that is no cheap thing.


If it's the BCS, then you can reconstruct your data with a Data Recovery Software--which is good to own anyway.


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## chimuelo (May 5, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Single platter drives can be physically dismantled and put into empty housings to retireve data.
A good Mac guy can do this, or of you know someone in the LAPD or UCLA Forensics teams, and slip 'em a buck or two.

Acronis is on sale for 29 USD at Newegg, and I can pop in and out any of my sample drives while playing and it only takes seconds to stream again.
It doesn't work on the system drive, but a reboot will, and it's like magic, everythings there.

Good Luck.
It happens to all of us who push the envelope or just plain forget.


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## Simplesly (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

It sounds to me like a mechanical failure on on of your read/write arms. I've used the freezer method in the past, with mixed results... You put the drive in the freezer in plastic bag with a silica gel - this can sometimes get the arm unstuck. If it were me, with the value of the data, I would probably do as Nick suggested and take it to a reputable data recovery specialist.


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## rpjd (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Would you have it on a Time Machine backup by any chance?

Ray


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## Jimbo 88 (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*



Simplesly @ Sun May 06 said:


> It sounds to me like a mechanical failure on on of your read/write arms. I've used the freezer method in the past, with mixed results... You put the drive in the freezer in plastic bag with a silica gel - this can sometimes get the arm unstuck. If it were me, with the value of the data, I would probably do as Nick suggested and take it to a reputable data recovery specialist.




+1 For me on this trick.. I should add, I believe the problem is a heat issue, so once the cooled off is put back into the computer, you have about an hour until it warms back up.


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## Mike Greene (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Thanks for the advice, guys. I have a couple calls out. I don't think this is going to be pretty. I bought a bunch of data recovery software and it's pretty clear this a physical thing. (Nick, I think you're guy may be MIA, by the way.)

This happening on Saturday is no help, either. Hard drive places with weekend phone staffs are the ones who smell desperation and are probably the ones who will ream me the most. I'll wait until Monday and hopefully find a sympathetic one.

I like the freezer idea. I'll have to scrounge up some silica gel. (I usually toss it, but hopefully there's a camera box or something where I kept a pack.)



rpjd @ Sun May 06 said:


> Would you have it on a Time Machine backup by any chance?


You obviously have me confused with someone who's smart.

My last backup of this drive, you might ask? December of 2010. I kid you not. I felt sicker and sicker as I went through my backup drives (about 15 of them, all unlabeled, of course) and realized that was the newest one. I can't believe I went that long without a backup, which I used to do several times a year.

Luckily Realivox *is* backed up in multiple places, so I'm okay there. All the demos are gone, though, since those would be on my Projects/Songs drive. Aside from some potentially angry clients, that's the worst part, because I'd been putting together some pretty cool video presentations.


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## EastWest Lurker (May 6, 2012)

Mike, you are not a newbie, you should know better. Now give me your Vox Continental as penance for being so careless.


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## midphase (May 6, 2012)

Jay is right, I'll take your vintage Telly...thank you.


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## rgames (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Usually when you hear the click there's no hope for software recovery... as already mentioned, you need to take it to someone who can tear it apart and yank the platters out to put them in another drive.

Also, if you hear the click then odds are the freezer or hammer trick won't work. Both of those techniques work to free up parts that aren't moving. If the drive spins up and you get the click (which is the sound of the read head bouncing against the stop position because it's flailing around trying to read data), everything is moving and you don't need to free anything up. So odds are it's either the read head that crapped out or some chip was fried.

Having said all that: what were you thinking?!?! No backup?

There are two types of hard drives: those that have failed and those that will. They're mechanical devices: they wear out. Which, by the way, is the reason why hard drives are bad for archiving: if you dump data onto them and let them sit for years without spinning up, you're increasing the odds of a mechanical lockup when you try to spin them up again.

Backing up is so easy these days: mine runs every evening and I never notice it. It's also a great ass-saver if you run incremental backups. Ever had a project file get corrupted? Or have you ever screwed up the project yourself? Well, if you do an incremental backup every day you can always pull up a previous day's version of a project and you never lose more than one day's work. I do that 2 - 3 times a year and every time I do, it's a HUGE time saver.

rgames


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## dinerdog (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Only 2GB? I'd send it to these guys pronto:

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

I think they charge by size. I once had a clicking/sticking unmountable 2TB drive with years of photography on it. It took a few weeks because the only method left was some slow way of copying bit by bit, but it was all recovered. EXPENSIVE cause the drive was large, but very worth a call to them. Highly recommended.


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## germancomponist (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*



rgames @ Sun May 06 said:


> Having said all that: what were you thinking?!?! No backup?



I have 2 USB hard drives connected, only for backups. When I am ready with my work for a day, I always save my projects on them. After this I have a good sleep! o-[][]-o


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## NYC Composer (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

It happened to me a few years ago with my boot drive, which included plug ins from companies that had gone out of business, some that no longer supported my old platform, etc. Nightmare. I'm VERY backed up these days.

I'll skip the scolding and just say I feel your pain.


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## Chriss Ons (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*



NYC Composer @ Sun 06 May said:


> I'll skip the scolding and just say I feel your pain.



+1. 
Hope your data can be salvaged.


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## dinerdog (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Just noticed DriveSavers has a hall of fame with quite a roster of saves:

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ ... l-of-fame/

Bob Weir was extremely Grateful after receiving his data back. Ha!


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## P.T. (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

I work mostly in midi so my files are fairly small.

I have a c: drive and an e: drive on which I keep my samples.
My projects folder is on my c: drive and I have a copy of it on my e: drive in which I only keep copies of the most recent (or sometimes a few more) version of each project.

I prefer this to backing up to a usb drive that is only used for backups because of what people say about an idle drive having a greater chance of going bad.


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## Mike Greene (May 6, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*



dinerdog @ Sun May 06 said:


> Only 2GB? I'd send it to these guys pronto:
> 
> http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/
> 
> I think they charge by size . . .


Oops. I meant 2TB, not 2GB. (I guess I'm showing my age that I'd think a drive could be 2GB. :mrgreen: )

I suspect the bit by bit method may be what I'm looking at. Since my drive is also 2TB, do you happen to remember what the cost was?


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## Brian Ralston (May 7, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Mike...with drive savers you are probably looking at $1500+ for a recovery of your drive data. But they are probably your only option now. And even then the recovered data won't be perfect. Some audio files may lose their connections in pro tools and logic sessions, etc....


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2012)

]quote] Nick, I think you're guy may be MIA, by the way.[/quote]

Les is gone? That would be sad.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2012)

I just called, Mike. You must have called when they were out.

Les Mannus 818/841-5766


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## noiseboyuk (May 7, 2012)

Just to say good luck and I feel your pain, Mike...


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## eschroder (May 7, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

I unfortunately made the same mistake of not backing up. Drive savers saved my life, seriously. They arnt cheap though. It cost $1650 to get everything back. The guys are super knowledgable and very understanding, as they put up with my daily calls to check on the status. My 2 cents.


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## 667 (May 7, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

There are a lot of online backup services as well. I have a paid service (SOS Backup) and use Google Drive (free, 5GB). See also Dropbox, Carbonite, etc. Google Drive / Dropbox are cool because if you have two computers running it you can have them sync-- so you have your stuff backed up in 'the cloud' as well as on multiple PCs. 

For large projects involving audio files I don't use online backup, because I don't want to be uploading and downloading huge amounts of data all the time. But for documents, midi files, cubase project files etc. they're perfect.


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## Mike Greene (May 7, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Well, it's out of my hands now. I went with a place called "Hard Drive 911" because they're local and I should have an initial (and binding) assessment by tomorrow. Drive Savers sounds like a good operation too, but with transit to the bay area, I probably wouldn't even know what would be savable until Thursday or Friday.

I'll update as the process goes along.

Nick, thanks for checking the number. You're right, there was no answer this weekend.

And thanks for the well wishes, guys.


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## Brian Ralston (May 8, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

Mike,

For the future. In addition to the local backups you will be doing, :wink: give serious consideration to adding *Backblaze* to the mix. http://www.backblaze.com/business.html

Similar to carbonite in that it runs in the background and gives you an off-site back-up...but can also do other internal and attached drives. Richard Bellis introduced me to it. Carbonite is just the system drive. Reasonable monthly fee for unlimited storage. It will take a long while to get most of it up there if you are backing up hundreds of GBs (many weeks to a month or two depending on your connection)...but once it is up there...it is up there and adding future files happens rather quickly either in the background or can be paused to happen later when you are not working on the system.


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## Mike Greene (May 17, 2012)

*Re: Uh oh. My hard drive seems to have died. Help?*

*The Conclusion - *

As I mentioned earlier, I went with a company called Hard Drive 911, who were highly recommended by some people I spoke with. My guess is that amongst the major (read: expensive) hard drive rescue places, they're all fairly similar in their success rates. So I went with these guys for two reasons - First, I had a referral, so I figured they would want to take good care of me. Second, they have a place in Los Angeles, so I figured that would save me time. They have free pick up and delivery via messenger for locals.

It costs $100 for them to look at a drive and evaluate how bad it is. They determined that it was indeed a physical problem with mine, so repair would be closer to the high end. (They say their highest fee for the worst possible drive is $1,900.) They gave me three options:

• Emergency Service - ASAP completion: $1625
• Priority Service: 5-7 weekday completion: $1375
• Standard Service: 9-11 weekday completion: $1250

I opted for ASAP service. A couple days later I got the news. Totally corrupted, nothing salvageable. Apparently this is ultra-rare. Rare enough that when this happens, they don't charge me, except for the $100 initial examination fee. I do believe that the news would have been the same anywhere else.

So now I'm piecing together what I can. Luckily, it's just the Projects dive, so all it had were songs I've worked on. Hopefully nothing I've done in the last year will need to be revisited. In a stroke of luck, one project that did need to be revisited happened a couple weeks ago and I had copied the files to my assistant's computer literally two days before this crash.

The worst thing though is that all my Realivox demos, as well as the videos I was putting together are gone. The instruments and samples and all that stuff are safe and secure on multiple other drives, but the demos are toast, other than mp3 mixes of some of them on the website.

Boy, have I learned my lesson! The entire studio is now backed up. I'm exploring various backup options. I don't like Time Machine or any of the other auto-backup options because they always seem to get active at the most annoying times. Like when I need to shut down and leave in a hurry. Or when I hear a hard drive start whirring all of a sudden for seemingly no reason.

I think I'll continue to backup manually, but with a more efficient plan. I bought a bunch of these new Seagate Baraccuda drives. (They're *not* the same as the Barracuda XT drives. These are semi-green drives, but 7200rpm.) They're only like $130 for 2 terabytes, so I'm installing those into the fourth slot of each of my computers. That way every day or two, I can just drag a copy of whatever I'm working on onto this drive as a copy. Fast and easy. I'll still maintain external backup drives, of course, but this way I can go a few months between massive backups.


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## koolkeys (May 17, 2012)

Sorry for the 'loss' Mike! It's a terrible feeling to lose work you've done. At least you didn't have to pay TOO much to find out what happened.

I wonder if all hope was lost due to trying to use the drive? It sounds like something I would do, trying to get it to work without help. But I wonder if that is what did the drive in completely?

Maybe the lesson within a lesson is that when a drive goes bad, start it up at your own risk realizing it may be more damaged?

It sucks regardless though. Glad the library is alright though! I have a suspicion that you would rather of lost music than lost the library, considering how much work went into it.

Brent


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## noiseboyuk (May 17, 2012)

Mike - condolences. Horrible pit-in-your-stomach stuff.

I know you said that you've had a bad experience with offsite backups, and I did too until I tried Dropbox (this so sounds like an infomercial). It is literally 5 times as fast as anything else I've tried, and best of all its genuinely invisible. You just go about your day, starting up, shutting down, anything you like, and it's a genuinely background task in real time. No scheduling, no nonsense - it just works.

I'm on the 50gb package ($100 a year). It takes a little bit of thought as to what you want to put on this priority service - for me it's the mixes and the projects basically. Other stuff I can shovel off to external drives once in a while. You can of course try it out for free with a couple of gigs space - just doing projects is enough there (certainly if your actual project audio is elsewhere).

An external drive failed for me a couple of days ago. I'm so paranoid now after my own loss, almost no data is missing - everything was in at least one other place. Took the opportunity to replace with a USB3 drive - fantastic.


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## drasticmeasures (May 17, 2012)

Mike,

*The freezer trick has worked for me 2 for 2.*
One time I DID have the head crash (the tick, tick, tick) and it worked fine. You have 5 minutes from the time you take it out of the freezer to save as much data as possible. You can refreeze after than and do again. HOWEVER, a 3rd time will not likely work. After that, you trash the drive. Guys who save data for a living will tell you that it doesn't work - which isn't really true.

*A zip baggie is not enough to keep condensation out.*

- A VERY tight wrap up of plastic wrap (preferably that stuff that has a sticky side designed to stick to the edge dishes).

- THEN the ziplock bag

-Freezer for 24 hours.

- Have an external drive frame OPEN and READY TO GO, because once that drive comes out of the freezer, you have 5 minutes tops.

Call me if you have any questions.


(somewhat unrelated, I've also tried the 'cook the video card in the oven' when it fails, but that didn't work for me!  )


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## synthetic (May 17, 2012)

Mike: I do NOT recommend having your backup drives as internal drives in the same computer. My wife found this out the hard way when her power supply fried and took out both discs. Also the whole system can be unplugged and stolen. 

Here is my system if you're interested. I have two 2TB external drives. They are cheap USB2 "Green Drives," doesn't matter much about the performance of these. One of them sits in a hidden drawer at home. The other backs up every night at 4am. I use a piece of software called "Time Machine Scheduler" so that Time Machine doesn't run all day long. On the first day of the month, I swap out the two backup drives. (A friend of mine uses a similar system but with the other drive in a safe deposit box.) 

Sorry about your data loss. We've all been there.


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## MichaelL (May 17, 2012)

Mike, so sorry about your situation. I had a similar experience -- twice. The first time involved my OS drive, after which I put a back-up drive on time machine in the fourth bay. The second time involved a sample drive (which was still under warranty). 

I now have one of these loaded http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=123, along with
portable back-up drives in a safety deposit box, at the bank.

My back-ups have back-ups.


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## Chriss Ons (May 17, 2012)

Really very sorry to hear this, Mike - but many (if not most) of us learn the hard way when it comes to setting up an effective backup system/schedule. I know I did.


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## IFM (May 17, 2012)

So sorry to hear that Mike! I back up everything with more critical data on and off site. I recommend QRecall as it only copies changed blocks instead of whole files so it takes far less space. 
Chris


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## Marius Masalar (May 18, 2012)

Mike,

Just as an additional idea for you to consider, you may want to think about a partial cloud backup. My system is entirely backed up onto external physical drives, but I have an extra layer of security set up in the form of a backup system called "Arq", which takes all of my project files and resulting music — the really crucial stuff — and beams them to Amazon's ultra-secure servers every evening at 8pm, while encrypting them in the process.

The advantages are fairly obvious: Amazon's servers offer the most ridiculous durability in the industry. Two whole data centres of theirs can literally explode and the data is still safe. Encryption keeps the traffic safe, and the fact that it's off-site means that any house-bound emergencies that can fry a physical backup in the house won't apply. Took a while to upload everything the first time, but backups after that are swift since it's only syncing changed items. Also does file versioning, which is neat.

They have an app that lets you check on your backups from your iPhone too, and the best part is that they host a command-line restoration utility on GitHub that's completely open-source, so even if the company that makes Arq dies, the data is still retrievable. Anyway, I'll let you read about it yourself if you decide to check it out, my point was just to drop in a recommendation for the system — it's been amazing for me:

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Just an additional detail: Arq is storing ~40GB worth of stuff on Amazon's S3 servers for me, and my monthly bill from Amazon for that space comes out to something hilarious like $2, which is significantly less than any other service that you can pay for to do cloud hosted backups for you.

Regarding the actual data loss you've suffered, I too feel your pain. You can imagine that for me to have made the effort to set up such a redundant backup system for my rig, I've been visited by that terrifying spectre as well. It's a real shame about the lost demos and videos, but you're among friends here and I'm sure there are lots of capable hands willing to lend some assistance with that kind of thing to get you back on schedule.

Good luck and let us know how you end up arranging your backups!


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## Pietro (May 18, 2012)

Sorry to hear, Mike.

I had a hard drive failure once on a RAID0 array, which contained all my life work. I had no backups whatsoever, but luckily I had help from a friend and we were able to restore it all.

Next time, something went crazy and one of my drives died with no warning. Luckily it was not my project or audio hard drive. But it tought me to backup.

Right now, I use Allway Sync (PC), which automaticaly makes backups of important files (projects, audio files and email) once every hour to an internal Caviar Green hard drive (only for backups). I also have another similar hard drive, external, on which I backup (with Allway Sync too), once every week or two, and hand it to my father to keep at his place.

I've been thinking about online storage, but for 450GB my backups take, it's not cheap, so I'll stick to my plan for now. (Oh, and because of the poor upload speed I have, it would take like 130 days straight to upload these files :D.) Or maybe I'll backup one month old files in the cloud in case some recent stuff got messed up.

- Piotr


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## eschroder (May 18, 2012)

I just started using crash plan. 3 bucks a month for unlimited storage... can't go wrong with that.


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## noiseboyuk (May 18, 2012)

I think the key with online storage is to plan regarding what needs to go there. It really only makes sense to have your current work in progress stuff online. The older stuff you can archive onto hard drives.

Sorry to plug again, but Dropbox is absolutely exceptional for this task. You don't worry about timed backups, or being interrupted, it requires zero thought after you've decided what goes in the folder. I tried so many solutions, they all took an age except Dropbox. OK, shutting up now.


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## Mike Greene (May 18, 2012)

Thanks guys! I need to look into some of these backup solutions. Probably external, since as Jeff said, there are risks with internal backup drives.

Until my internet here is better (uploads are typically 50 to 70kb per second. And that's when the internet is working at all) I need to work primarily with hard drive backups. I'll probably switch ISP's soon, so I'll look into those backup solutions then.



koolkeys @ Thu May 17 said:


> I wonder if all hope was lost due to trying to use the drive? It sounds like something I would do, trying to get it to work without help. But I wonder if that is what did the drive in completely?


I think that may have been a big factor. Not only did I try starting and stopping a zillion times to try and get the thing going, I even put it into another computer and tried yet again. And . . . I hate to admit this, but I tried wacking it against the desk, hoping that might shake something loose. That was pretty dumb.

In hindsight, it does seem like you should just take the drive out immediately, but who has the willpower to do that? I think it's in our natures to think we can get it going. But I do think I'll be a little more gentle next time. :mrgreen:


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 18, 2012)

Question (to myself as well as the brain trust): why not hang the bootable clone of my system drive on the router at a friend's house - off-site, in other words - where it can be backed up incrementally over the internet? You could make that a reciprocal thing, swapping drives.

That would mean you always have an off-site, up-to-date back-up in case of nuclear holocaust. And it would be practical to back up everything, because you're carrying the drive over instead of doing the initial back-up over the internet.


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## John Rodd (May 18, 2012)

Sorry for your data loss... a really big bummer.

*for project data:*

I am a fan of multiple backups 

example - an off site copy
an internal drive (that can remain unmounted, and the smart backup utility will mount the drive when you tell it to backup.... then unmount it again)

plus an external drive as well

If you have the discipline to back up frequently (I run a smart backup about every 20-30 minutes when cranking away while recording, mixing or mastering) then i'd suggest a smart backup such as Synchronize Pro X or similar. (that is a Mac option)

keep in mind that computers can get stolen / flooded / burnt up in a fire / blow up / etc... so this is why an off site backup is good too.

you could also use a 'cloud' automatic backup.

lots of good options....

*for your system drive*

always have at least ONE exact clone of your system drive... keep it current... and preferably off site. For Mac CarbonCopyCloner (free) is a good option.


good luck moving forward from here...

john


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## rgames (May 18, 2012)

Whatever backup method you use, make sure it's incremental. It saves time and your ass because (if you do it once a day) you can recover a previous day's version of a project you screwed up. Ask me how I know...

For archiving, hard disks are a bad idea because you need to spin them up regularly to keep them working. Optical media are a much better choice - I usually dump a bunch of stuff to Blu-Ray once a year or so. Each disc can hold 50 GB and, of course, they have no moving parts!

The online solutions are very appealing but I can't see them working until network bandwidth goes up a factor of 10 or so. My daily increments are often 1 GB or more - doing that upload would take a long time on my connection. It takes just a couple minutes to an external drive (and there's no effect on performance).

EDIT: Oh yeah, swap out your external backup once a month or so and take it to another location.

rgames


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## noiseboyuk (May 19, 2012)

rgames @ Sat May 19 said:


> My daily increments are often 1 GB or more - doing that upload would take a long time on my connection.



Wow, how are you getting 1GB of increments per day?! I can imagine if you are daily recording an orchestra....

Of course our connections will be different, but I thought I'd do a road test on Dropbox. I'm on a very good connection here - cable fibre 50mpbs. I just uploaded a 1GB file in 34 minutes. Now, the crucial thing here is that - presumably - you are generating new files throughout the day with a lot of live recordings. The thing with Dropbox (about which I clearly am absurdly evangelical) is that it is instant and real time - the millisecond the new file is generated or old file updated, it starts doing its thing (and it is also intelligent enough to know if stuff has just been renamed for example). All day those files are quietly being backed up in the background, and never once have I noticed any performance degradation. No waiting for a timed backup at 8pm, no need to manually invoke anything. Chances are when you are done for the day and switch off, everything is already there (just check your little light is green and not blue when powering off) - if your last job is generating a lot of stems then you might have a 20 minute wait I guess.


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## Daryl (May 19, 2012)

Dropbox is good for temporary archiving. However, for me it would be useless for a real time backing up, because it would require an Internet connection.

My method of backing up is:

1) Save incrementally during the day
2) At the end of the day transfer the project files to a memory stick and upload to Dropbox.
3) Once a week save the whole project onto aA external drive.
4) At the end of the project, save onto my Master backup disc and take another copy to my off-site store.

I don't really need anything else. The only thing I am risking is if my computer drive blows up during the day, I have lost 1 days work.

D


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## noiseboyuk (May 19, 2012)

I guess it's another whole thread about connecting your DAW to the net. Have to say, in all my years of doing this, I haven't experienced a problem of having a connected DAW. Firewall and basic antivirus is all I use. Again, I've never had a problem that I've traced to a/v or firewall - it's always suspected but never responsible in my experience. I can understand the ultra-caution, but imo it's overkill in today's world to have a detached DAW. With software updates, online authorisations and real time offsite backups etc, the advantages of being connected are too great. The important thing is not to clutter the DAW with other software, or with general web broswing chores, to keep it fairly clean.


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## Daryl (May 19, 2012)

noiseboyuk @ Sat May 19 said:


> I guess it's another whole thread about connecting your DAW to the net. Have to say, in all my years of doing this, I haven't experienced a problem of having a connected DAW. Firewall and basic antivirus is all I use. Again, I've never had a problem that I've traced to a/v or firewall - it's always suspected but never responsible in my experience. I can understand the ultra-caution, but imo it's overkill in today's world to have a detached DAW. With software updates, online authorisations and real time offsite backups etc, the advantages of being connected are too great. The important thing is not to clutter the DAW with other software, or with general web broswing chores, to keep it fairly clean.


Guy, in my case it has nothing to do with viruses. IMO only stupid people get those anyway. :wink: 

If I was connected to the Internet, it would most likely have a detrimental effect on the latency that I can run the machine at. Not being connected to the Internet is no hardship at all to me. The only time that I have to do it is to authorise new software. I don't do that terribly often, so it is not a problem. I could always have a connection and then disable it, but can't really be bothered, TBH.

D


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## noiseboyuk (May 19, 2012)

Weird - I'm totally unaware of any latency issues with being online.


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## Daryl (May 19, 2012)

noiseboyuk @ Sat May 19 said:


> Weird - I'm totally unaware of any latency issues with being online.


What buffer do you work at?

D


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## noiseboyuk (May 19, 2012)

Daryl @ Sat May 19 said:


> noiseboyuk @ Sat May 19 said:
> 
> 
> > Weird - I'm totally unaware of any latency issues with being online.
> ...



OK, it's new thread time - have answered here. http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3628650 . Back to Mike's woes!


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## rgames (May 19, 2012)

noiseboyuk @ Sat May 19 said:


> Wow, how are you getting 1GB of increments per day?! I can imagine if you are daily recording an orchestra....


Yeah - always seemed like a lot to me, too. However, the daily increment makes a new copy of everything that got touched that day (so you can always recover the state of your system at the end of any day). So I guess it's not that outrageous.

Also, I like having the "snaphot" at the end of every day instead of a continuously changing backup. That way, I can go back and re-open a project file from any day's "snaphot". I don't really understand how you can do that with a continuous backup - it seems to me a continuous backup would have a mish-mash of files backed up at different times. So, for example, maybe a project file is saved at 10:00 but some audio is updated and saved at 11:00, so if you try to recover that project, they don't match up in time. Of course, you have the same issue using an external drive, but the time span is only a minute or two, not hours.

rgames


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## noiseboyuk (May 22, 2012)

A story to make us all feel a little better - how the entire movie of Toy Story 2 got deleted mid-production, and how the backup plan failed. Then how it was eventually recovered... and how they then deleted almost all of it again, this time on purpose. http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/ ... own%20good (can't make this hyperlink properly - copy and paste the entire address between http and before these parenthesis).


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## mk282 (May 22, 2012)

noiseboyuk - next time use URL shortening service like tinyurl.com. 


http://tinyurl.com/boasdr5


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## noiseboyuk (May 22, 2012)

mk282 @ Tue May 22 said:


> noiseboyuk - next time use URL shortening service like tinyurl.com.
> 
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/boasdr5



Oooh that's clever. Yeah, click that one, everyone!


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## NYC Composer (May 22, 2012)

Somewhat OT, but do you guys use Autosave? l use it in Cubase, and it makes a backup copy at a user specified time-which has saved my bacon about 20 times. lt's slightly interruptive and well worth it, imo.


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## Siebert (Jun 4, 2012)

Sorry to hear of your loss (sheesh, sounds like bereavement) Sort of after the fact here... but that program SuperDuper for the Mac is really good. It automagically runs a full bootable backup of my main computer every night and is set up for weekly backups of my samples drive. It has saved me only 3 times in 5 years but that's enough.


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## Daryl (Jun 5, 2012)

NYC Composer @ Wed May 23 said:


> Somewhat OT, but do you guys use Autosave? l use it in Cubase, and it makes a backup copy at a user specified time-which has saved my bacon about 20 times. lt's slightly interruptive and well worth it, imo.


I go through stages of using it and not using it. You are right in that it does interrupt things and sometimes I'm trying to draw some MIDI controller in and it stops me, which is annoying, but now that I have things like Engine in the project, not having autosave would be rather risky.

Having said that I do tend to save quite often, so I've never needed it so far.

One more thing to add; for people using VEP with slaves PCs, if they are running coupled, like I always do, it could take a while, and that might be really annoying. :wink: 

D


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## dinerdog (Mar 18, 2013)

I know, I know, I know...

Stupidly, I still had a 2TB drive that was not backed up (I know, I know, I know). It had thousands of photos and videos on it. Well (and I've never done this before) I had a bunch of drives connected to my MacPro and stuck in a 2GB SD card to format. In my rush I just saw a "2", clicked on it and chose "Erase" from disk utility. Before I knew it, I had erased my 2TB Video drive instead of the 2GB SD card. I felt sick. >8o 

To make a long story short, I ended buying Data Rescue 3 from Prosoft:

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

And after 24 hours of scanning and another day and a half recreating was able to save EVERYTHING! This program found 3.4TBs of info. If had recreated things that hadn't been on the drive for ages.

I just want to say that for $100, you should have this on your computer. I'm still speechless that this was even possible. I guess it can't help for mechanical failures, but for an accident like this where (I know, I know, I know) something wasn't backed up, it was more than a miracle. : >


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## Darthmorphling (Mar 18, 2013)

dinerdog @ Mon Mar 18 said:


> I know, I know, I know...
> 
> Stupidly, I still had a 2TB drive that was not backed up (I know, I know, I know). It had thousands of photos and videos on it. Well (and I've never done this before) I had a bunch of drives connected to my MacPro and stuck in a 2GB SD card to format. In my rush I just saw a "2", clicked on it and chose "Erase" from disk utility. Before I knew it, I had erased my 2TB Video drive instead of the 2GB SD card. I felt sick. >8o
> 
> ...



This is extrememly important to remember: deleting is not the same as permanently removing. Until your information has been written over it still lives on your hard drive. Ollie North learned this the hard way.


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## dinerdog (Mar 18, 2013)

Yes, I think I knew that, which is why I didn't touch the drive. I was afraid to even restart the computer, but your totally right.

I'm still kind of amazed that it found all my current files and then some.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Mar 18, 2013)

Glad to hear it, Stephen!


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## dinerdog (Mar 18, 2013)

Thanks Nick, one of those "rare" occasions where I got a second chance. : >


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## redleicester (Mar 18, 2013)

NAS

NAS

NAS

NAS

and NAS.


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