Warning: back up your stuff

vicmilt wrote on 9/30/2007, 5:16 AM
Hey All -

After twenty years of computing, I NEVER thought it would happen to me...
but my project was just too big and too long to avoid an "insurance policy".

So about a month ago I bit the bullet and backed up four 500 gig drives of HDV files to four new hard drives. I figured that $500 bucks was a small enough investment to make to insure over a hundred hours of media, and nearly four months of intensive editing. And my main thought was that if a hurricane appeared on the horizon (I live in Florida) - I could FedEx my backup drives to some other place of safety.

I had also asked this forum about redigitizing lost media files in HDV, and no one seemed to believe you could do it. Something about the timecode and long GOP files. In SD you could simply redig the files. It might take a few hours, but it could be done. I'm still not certain about HDV.

Well that paranoia totally paid off this week. One of my Western Digital drives with 500 gig of media refused to mount. This particular drive is less than a year old. And I had "hard deadlines" to reach. With trembling hands, I replaced the drive with the backup, and in less than 20 minutes I was back on-line. WHOOPEE... (I also immediately bought a replacement HD for the backup).

I never really believed in HD crashes - I'm a total convert.

v

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 9/30/2007, 5:40 AM
I used Western Digital drives exclusively up until a few years ago. They started failing one after the other in numerous machines. I switched to Seagate drives and haven't had a single issue with any of them. I've got about 40 of them online including 8 in a server that runs 24 hours a day and gets pounded pretty hard. These 8 drives have been in the server for about three years now (and they still have two years left on the warranty!)

John
Soniclight wrote on 9/30/2007, 5:54 AM
Whether working with as many as some of you or just on one standalone, this thread is really preachin' to choir :) But real life stories help to bring the point home to those who may think it's more of a "Ah, shucks, sometimes."

I am among the "small people" system category and don't run my drives into the ground, but have had luck with WDs so far (I've had one on Firewire for almost 6 years, and it's still purring along. My newer core ones are Hitachi Deskstars.

Part of the secret to disk longevity is the same as with any micorprocessing technology: reduce heat, heat, heat. I can't afford nor wish to use system watercooling, but have done some slightly ingenious DIY installation of extra fans for the disks.

My disk temps are usually in the low to mid 30s Celsius, and they like that :)
farss wrote on 9/30/2007, 6:27 AM
I was pretty fanatical about keeping disks cool too however a recent report from Google seemed to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom and they have a lot of disks spinning around. From memory they found no single factor that determined disk life, temperature, how hard it was used or even how much it cost, the expensive SCSI ones failed just the same.

Victors experience though is most unusual, I've never heard of a disk failing that was backed up.

Bob.
richard-courtney wrote on 9/30/2007, 6:51 AM
I was afraid you were going to tell of a sad ending......
good planning and whew!!!
Chienworks wrote on 9/30/2007, 7:16 AM
I can't believe that heat is good for the drives, nor that cooling is a useless idea. I was very much a diehard WD fan for decades. However, i too have recently starting having a disproportionate amount of WD failures with their newer drives. I've switched to Seagate and found them to be very reliable. The one very obvious thing i've noticed is that as WD drives get higher and higher capacity, they run much hotter. I've got a 250GB WD that runs too hot to touch (OUCH!). Every other WD over 160GB has failed within a year, some within a few months. Very sad. Now i've got a few Seagates in the 320 - 500GB range and they all run cool (relatively speaking). I haven't had them long enough to know for sure, but i am coming up on a year with no issues.

At work we run entirely Seagate SATA 300 drives, 300GB and bigger, in our server racks. we've probably got about 80 of them running in one cabinet and some of them are nearly 2 years old now. We've never had a drive issue after installation and testing yet. We did get a couple DOA drives, but Seagate replaced those immediately.
DelCallo wrote on 9/30/2007, 10:02 AM
vicmilt:
What happened that caused your drive not to mount. I'm curious. Is it a firewire external drive or is it internal?

In my years of computing, I have, fortunately, only experienced two failures. One was a drive at my office on a 24/7 machine that was really old. The other is a drive I have used in a Maxtor firewire enclosure. I thought the problem was related to write delay failure (still tend to suspect that as the source of troubles). I used "getdataback" to salvage the data successfully, but, when I went to format the drive, nothing I tried would work. The data is still on the drive, and I can still use "getdataback" to access that data, but the drive refuses to respond to attempts to format it, no matter if I try from XP or Ubuntu.

It makes an almost siren like noise when you power it up, siren inversed when you power it down.

So I guess that drive really is toast.

Most of my other near disasters involving data loss did have directly to do with XP's nasty habit of losing contact with firewire drives. I believe the problems occurred with this contact loss occurred when whatever process I was running was actively writing to or accessing data from the drive in question. I'm no expert, but believe that the sector that identifies the drive to XP becomes corrupted (would that be the MBR or the TOC or something like that?) and, although the drive is otherwise healthy, XP fails to see or mount the drive.

Without fail (except for the toasted drive described above), I have always been able to retrieve the data using "getdataback" and then reformat it to redeploy it as a fresh drive.

So, I'm curious what you wound up doing with that drive that failed. You trashed it, or you formatted it for reuse?

Del
vicmilt wrote on 9/30/2007, 11:35 AM
It was a WD one year old 500 gig SATA drive - hard wired into it's own card in the computer.

I was doing two or three things at a time when it coughed and then died. Since I already had the full backup - more on this below - I swapped drives and went on with the project.

At this point we're waiting for an RMA from WD to replace the drive.

RE: workflow and backup
I WISELY chose to keep my data (media only) on separate drives from my VEG files and pre-renders figuring (incorrectly) that if I had the VEG files I could always redigitize the files from the tapes. Then when I queried this forum, it turned out you could NOT redig the tapes in dead sync and that warning coupled with the need for true off-site (out of state) storage (me Florida resident within 10 miles of Atlantic) led to the fortuitous backing up of the half terrabyte of media.
I STRONGLY recommend this action from this point forward. HD space is so cheap...

v
UlfLaursen wrote on 9/30/2007, 12:26 PM
Thanks for sharing this, Victor....sometimes others horror storries can make you think twice, and yes, storrage is cheap today.
I use a D-link storage box on gigabit lan with mirrored drives for data (not actual footage), but pictures, PSD files, graphics, discprint layouts, intro/outros etc. just as backup in any case :) and with gigabit it's fast transfer.

/Ulf
fldave wrote on 9/30/2007, 1:26 PM
Congrats on planning ahead, Vic!

Now, to be really safe, buy 6 additional drives and back up the 4 again (3 copies). Use the other two to make two copies of everything else you have.

Take the third copy of everything and put in Safe Deposit box or a friends house. You need to think of fire as well as hurricanes!

Dave
Laurence wrote on 9/30/2007, 1:30 PM
Vic:

Usually when a hard disc fails, it is because of overheating. I would check all the fans in the case which houses the hard drives. I've had two drives fail in a row because of a faulty fan and not realized that the fan was the culprit until the second failure. Check all your fans and blow a little compressed air through everything to make sure it is all clean.

As far as drive makes go, I have had failures with all the major brands, mainly due to mounting them in cases that weren't sufficiently cooled. Now I know better. I'm more picky about cases and cooling than I am about which drives I use. Since using that approach I haven't had any failures.
Paul Fierlinger wrote on 9/30/2007, 1:39 PM
I too backup all my files on external Seagate drives. Whenever I want to amuse a guest when talk comes around to dumb design features of consumer products I demonstrate my Seagates, which have an off/on switch that one needs to keep depressed until a small blue light turns on to indicate that it is O.K. to now release the button, and this takes awhile. The problem, and source of merriment always is, that the small blue light is also the button itself so you can't see when the light comes on -- or goes off, because you are always covering it with a finger. A great HD with a dumb-ass off/on switch!
riredale wrote on 9/30/2007, 5:06 PM
Glad to see that the project wasn't clobbered when you lost a drive. But, you CAN recreate all your m2t clips just fine. I've done it several times (on short projects, just to prove it can be done) and everything works fine. Still, by having a recent backup you avoided the time involved in rebuilding all those clips.

Incidentally, I have no idea whether the Vegas m2t capture utility can exactly duplicate the original captures. I would assume that it can, but have never tried it. I'm using 7d and HDVSplit.77b here.
rmack350 wrote on 9/30/2007, 5:22 PM
LOL!
quoka wrote on 9/30/2007, 6:33 PM
We run about 50 HD's in the studio, and have been using computers since the day they were invented.
Our experience is usually
- Fan failure causes overheating
- Case becoming full of dust makes fans inefficient (a small amount of dust around the fan really can upset the aerodynamics of the small fans)
- turning systems on & off usually kills HD's (we now never turn computers off)
- Power spikes or shortages coming from local grid kills HD's.

We now(touchwood) usually expect 3 - 4 years life from HD's.
jrazz wrote on 9/30/2007, 6:42 PM
I bought a hard drive to place some footage on for another studio to edit. It was a WD essential USB 2.0 hard drive. I hooked it up to my computer and my pc locked up. I restarted and it wouldn't boot. I restarted again after unplugging the drive and it started up again. I then attempted to hook the drive up again and again it locked up my system. I restarted again and got the message: No OS found (or something similar). It messed up my boot order and some other cmos settings. I reset them to how they were and got my machine back up and running. (this was yesterday)

What I find odd is that I have a 1TB (raid) WD USB2.0/Firewire 400/800 drive and it works fine via usb2 or firewire. I also have several other hard drives hooked up (hitachi, laCie, seagate, and a azio- I don't know what hard drive is in that one)

j razz
Logan5 wrote on 10/1/2007, 9:21 AM
good save & good save
ken c wrote on 10/1/2007, 10:16 AM
I back up my stuff daily ... always important ... just bought another 750 gig seagate hard drive from newegg for $210 .. great deals nowadays...

I'll copy at least my veg's , which are the hard work, onto an identically-named subdirectory on another drive, at least once a day, from all projects I work on, as well as website pages/graphics... and burn that to DVD at least once every few days..

-ken
Dan Sherman wrote on 10/1/2007, 1:01 PM
We are using Netgear mirrored drives for archiving and backup.
Chances are they won't both collapse at the same time.
DelCallo wrote on 10/1/2007, 1:19 PM
I wonder if you saved your vidcap file (maybe you did) if you wouldn't be able to recapture in sync and use the newly captured footage with existing veg files. I'm thinking that, if you used advanced capture to document your start/stop points, time code on the tape should make the new capture sync up with the veg files. You would think this possible?
Del

John_Cline wrote on 10/1/2007, 2:50 PM
There's an old adage that says that digital data isn't safe unless it exists in at least two places. I back stuff up and keep a copy of it off-site.

If you're regularly backing up folders to another drive, Microsoft has a free utility called "SyncToy" that is useful in a lot of circumstances. Something to have in the toolbox.

John
ScorpioProd wrote on 10/2/2007, 6:01 PM
Definately multiple backups are the way to go where possible.

I've backed up projects on external drives for a long time now, and low and behold, one of my external hard drives that's only a year or two old, and has frankly had much more powered down storage time than powered up storage time, now keeps going bang, bang, bang with the servo when I connect it up.

I'm happy I have the stuff on it elsewhere as well. It's a 300GB Seagate Barracuda.
rsp wrote on 10/23/2007, 1:25 PM
No doubt about it : backing up is one of the most important thing.

However what to do when your external 500GB Lacie usb2 drive suddenly produces nothing but $mft errors..... Lacie tried to be helpful but i already found their solutions on the internet. In the end it is go back to your dealer etc. but no guarantee you'll get your files back....

By accident i found out that an old pc with usb1.1 doesn't give that $mft error and is giving me, very slowly indeed, back the files. Perhaps this may be useful for anyone in the future?
dibbkd wrote on 10/23/2007, 5:46 PM
True, nothing can beat a good backup.

But if a drive fails, nothing can beat http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htmSpinrite[/link] for hard drive recovery.




teaktart wrote on 10/26/2007, 12:29 AM
"My new best friend" the tech guy who just fixed my CPU, saved my RAID files, saved my sanity and rear end as well ...
Blessings upon him! May he never get alzheimers.....

My 'not quite 2 yr old 'editing' machine' cost me $600 about 4 months ago when a video card went bad and I decided to go ahead and upgrade and with 3 monitors needed 2 identical cards.

August bought my first laptop and am not having much luck with Vista and V8 working together. Black frames, capture problems, crashes... $1500

Sept. decide to transfer some video files to the laptop before taking it on a camping trip. Editing CPU won't start.....drop off at the repair shop on the way out of town.

Diagnosis:
Bad Power supply
also found C: drive is going out, replace 10K 74GB
Tech Guy (my new best friend) manages to copy drive files to another drive and transfer back onto new C: drive, huge relief!
$550

A Week later programs and OS freezing up like crazy, back to the shop
Diagnosis:
Bad RAID controller
ASUS recently discontinued the same or compatible motherboard....for the RAID controller

Meanwhile, run to Costco and pick up a 500GB ext drive ($162) and pray like hell that he can get the files off my RAID before the controller totally dies and onto the ext drive. (I really did lose sleep overnight hoping I could save my rear end, sanity, and all the rest if we get the data transfered). The gods were with us and I got my backup !

Decided to bite the financial bullet and invest in the future...
New Motherboard
4 GB new memory
Quad Core
Reinstall OS
and misc other stuff
$1500

So much for the 46" Samsung I was thinking about.....!
But I am starting to have fun with V8a which is working well and
Wow is this 'born again' CPU faster than when it was a dual core.

I sure wasn't planning on spending this much on rebuilding a 'less than 2 yr old' machine but when each component broke down it just seemed to make more sense to try and upgrade if possible. With the new hardware I'm looking forward to adding a HDTV for previews in the future and then I'll have my editing suite "finished" ....for now...

Eileen