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 Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive 
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Post Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
Apparently, Rosie put "everything" on this external HDD she had. It went bad (still kinda seen when hooked up, but doesn't seem readable for various reasons).

Anyway, ran ddrescue which could only recover about a gig. More retries might do better, but we don't want to make the matter worse. So, she wants to take it to a recovery place tomorrow, but that's going to be super expensive. Like, $600 possibly. I could have built a Small NAS for that amount if I had known this would happen or how important this was to Rose.

Moral of the story, don't put everything you care about in just an external HDD. They are decent for backing up files you have on a computer. They are good for quickly transferring files between places and keeping day to day things on. They are even fine as something you can use to save files that you can otherwise re-create. Don't put your important, non-replacable things ONLY on a single external drive though. They fail, especially after a few years. They WILL fail with use, some sooner than others.

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 12:52 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
I have daisy chained several External HDD. It's slightly cheaper than buying a drobo.

I suppose I could make one... that would probably be smarter, honestly.

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:10 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
I've been wanting to build my own FreeNAS machine for a while. If you do it right and have the funds to put in a couple small SSDs as read and write caches, and put in some good network cards (not like it needs to be that big a deal honestly) you can get some really amazing performance for whatever your network is, very good redundancy/backup capacity with plenty of warning before loosing data, and overall be the cool guy that can say "I do that thing".

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 1:33 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
n0th1n wrote:
Apparently, Rosie put "everything" on this external HDD she had. It went bad (still kinda seen when hooked up, but doesn't seem readable for various reasons).

Anyway, ran ddrescue which could only recover about a gig. More retries might do better, but we don't want to make the matter worse. So, she wants to take it to a recovery place tomorrow, but that's going to be super expensive. Like, $600 possibly. I could have built a Small NAS for that amount if I had known this would happen or how important this was to Rose.

Moral of the story, don't put everything you care about in just an external HDD. They are decent for backing up files you have on a computer. They are good for quickly transferring files between places and keeping day to day things on. They are even fine as something you can use to save files that you can otherwise re-create. Don't put your important, non-replacable things ONLY on a single external drive though. They fail, especially after a few years. They WILL fail with use, some sooner than others.


external hard drives are also bad because you can lose them, I put my entire old portfolio on an external hard disk, and lost it. I know it's either scrubbed or in a dump. all because my GF can;t keep her hands off my Portfolio drive, she constantly saves resumes visa pictures and other shit to random zip drives at the last second before we have to run to an interview. Fuck that Shit.

Now I want a picture of the samus suit I made and the only picture I have and the model itself are on an offline disconnected hard drive half way across the world. I had a copy of the picture online, but image shack was a whore and now it's a fucking whore nun. I made an account on image shack and gave them the link to the pic and asked for a copy but the bastards have not replied. it's been weeks, the free account is almost expired. fuck their lazy asses.

oh and protip, never save your stuff in "My Documents" or any of the other "My" folders supplied by Windows, if your hard drive fails to boot it still may be readable on a file by file basis, catch is when booting in MSDOS to access the file system My Documents is missing on purpose, windows says it's a security feature attempting to access it gives errors.

You can however access it from Linux but can't change files, the most you can do is copy. so remember that, never save in the My folders if you want to be able to get your shit off when it crashes.

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:19 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
How does an external HDD go 'bad'?

I currently use two of them. One for active use and transport of files, the other's locked away in the safe.

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 7:59 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
YomToxic wrote:
How does an external HDD go 'bad'?

I currently use two of them. One for active use and transport of files, the other's locked away in the safe.


It depends on their design and it's a hardware issue, Flash disks and memory cards and the like are rated for 100,000 read write operations because of their physical data writing and reading utilities slowly burning through the medium the data is stored in. once it burns through in any spot the device will become inoperable and all files lost.

External magnetic disk Hard disks, great for storage and use, but even they have a life rating of 4 to 6 years, you can exceed this if you are not a moron but eventually the magnetic disks get 'magnetic bleeding' where data from one region flips it's polarity and starts a chain reaction in the localized area thus nerfing any files on that disk region.

There is not perfect storage medium, even backup CDs and DVDs are at risk to warping in hot or cold temperatures, getting scratched, and burning out the same as a flash disk if over used.

Japan has the answer, it's been prototyped and verified but is not commercially available yet, Good old University of Tokyo (ah love hina days) a guy there invented a way to store 20 TB worth of data via holographic storage in a 1 inch by 1 inch cube of solid quartz. the only problem is the regions burned into it are permanent for several million years, there are no backsies or editing! for archival purposes ONLY!

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 9:17 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
There are actually a lot of ways for external drives, and really any hard drive, to go bad. It's not a matter of 'if' either, it's just a matter of when. Best case scenario, your drive lasts until bitrot shows up and starts bleeding ones into zeros due to decay of the materials and other factors.

More likely, if used regularly, things similar to what joshex can happen. Some newer flash based memory can last longer now, but that's also why it's recommended to not constantly reformat them anyway and not use certain file systems that do a lot of extra read and writing to different areas. I would say that a lot handle bad areas now, so it's not if any go bad you are screwed, some will mark off a bad area and just stop using them, and many companies have extra areas so that for a while you don't appear to loose space. Eventually, it degrades further and further and you can loose key data points anyway. But, even aside from that, with both flash and magnetic, you can run into electrical problems in some of the other circuitry or other issues such as a power surge frying areas.

An HDD is more likely to go bad as it has moving parts, for one. It can in theory hold up to more reads and writes in ideal conditions, but it's also typically not rated for as high of impact or vibration for instance as the spinning parts and the head can get off balance, seize up, hit into each other, etc and cause problems. A HDD can also damage itself in this process. There are more ways to go bad as well, but typically you can only expect a few years, with a chance of something dying a week or two in even.

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Mon Feb 08, 2016 8:04 pm
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
So, now their saying there *might* be some mechanical problems with the drive, as they aren't getting good data after doing something to the firmware of the outside board, and if there are mechanical problems it could cost $1700, which is way up there out of the range they said to begin with and higher than I've seen many place report for disaster recovery.

First, what the hell, I can't believe Rosie cares this much about the data, and it really should have been backed up somewhere if it was that important.
Second, how do I get into this business?

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Wed Feb 17, 2016 7:44 pm
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
Lack of ethics and a basic understanding of economics.

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Thu Feb 18, 2016 4:54 pm
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
psychokittyboy wrote:
Lack of ethics and a basic understanding of economics.


That sounds more like how you start one of those businesses, I just want a job at a place already running. They can handle the business overhead and take their cut.

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Thu Feb 18, 2016 7:25 pm
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
Oh, then yeah, just lose the ethics. You'll be set to work there.

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Thu Feb 18, 2016 7:56 pm
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
This is not the first time ethics has gotten in the way of my employment...

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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
Doesn't ethics increase as you work on computers/hardware repair stuff?

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Fri Feb 19, 2016 9:03 am
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Post Re: Been some intense things to try to recover a hard drive
YomToxic wrote:
Doesn't ethics increase as you work on computers/hardware repair stuff?


Not necessarily. There's nothing about working on computers or hardware in particular that would increase your ethics, other than perhaps if you are working ethically to begin with and thus generally increasing your ethics through practice and experience, depending on how you see the nature of ethics.

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