[Moderators: Please put this thread wherever is deemed appropriate!]
Just wanted to add a little tidbit here:
What good is security, if you lose your hard drive w/ no good backup?
Do not assume that your HD will last "forever". How long is that?
I think it depends on your (lemon) luck.... please let me explain...
I have bought a brand new drive. It lasted me 3 months. How did I know
that it was going bad or has a problem? Run drive vendor's S.M.A.R.T software
on the drive and it will tell you if the drive's internal checks are ok or not or
better yet - hope that your OS has good SMART technology installed with
good warning systems - but read on for the details...
If there are problems with the drive and still under warrantee, get an RMA and
send the drive back to the manufacturer (or to the store if you bought
insurance), and it will come back in maybe 3-4 weeks. You will most likely
get back a factory refurbished drive. As (lemon) luck would have it, the refurbished
drive also failed in <3 months. I am still waiting for a returned drive. Sending
the drive back means you have to pay for the shipping. When I called the
manufacturer to complain about having to pay shipping for the 2nd drive, I
requested that they pay for the shipping and they authorized "pre-paid"
shipping for me. If you do not ask, then you pay for shipping again, and
again, and again then you have paid more than the drive is worth... could
have bought a new drive, and perhaps the cycle repeats?
Meanwhile, there is a good chance that the data is corrupted and beyond
recovery or lost forever. Did you do a backup? How long ago was it? The
recovery is only good as the most recent (uncorrupted) backup. BTW,
it is of course possible to backup a virus infected system - so make sure
you remove the virus or restore a previous KNOWN good/virus-free backup.
I did NOT know that the drive was bad running win2000/XP/Vista until I installed
and ran the LATEST Fedora v11 (it pops up with a warning of the bad SMART
drive and stays there forever on your screen - until the drive is replaced. neat,
Huh? However, F11 is not recommend for production - I wonder if Ubuntu has
this feature as well) and this was a RECENT Fedora added feature (the popup,
that is) but previous versions required you to check the logs for potential problems.
The point is, get a VERY good backup and restore program. For XP/Vista/Win7,
I would recommend Acronis True Image. It does a TRUE backup and restore and
your data, 100% restored, anywhere, any drive, any partition, EASY to use GUI
but of course make sure your backup is good too!
Do NOT rely on Microsoft's backup solution - it is horrible, imo. I recommend that you
get a USB drive exclusively for saving your backup files, and remove the drive afterwards
after a backup.
As of 1 year ago, also bought a HD for my daughter and right off the bat, it was acting
"funny" as the data was being corrupted at random times - and running chkdsk
(which is NOT automatic process, and needs to be manually invoked), might recover
the drive, or give you missing or corrupted files and put into a special place at C:\ drive,
or simply fail and stop right there. But as (lemon) luck had it, it ran for a year like this
until it reached a point where bad-sectors (permanently lost data areas) in random
places - even though the OS was booting and running but when a program runs and
hits the bad-sector error locations - the system would freeze up. We lived with this
for awhile - and during that time after a year a learning about the SMART technology,
I checked the drive a lo and behold - the drive history was showing me how bad it
really was! It took me a long time to discover Acronis - it actually was able to
recover the entire drive in spite of bad-sectors (both XP and Vista, but does not
support win2000-pro (or 2000 workstation) as this requires a separate product)
and the neat thing is - it is VERY fast, it has a lot of "smarts", and knows how to
deal with the special "security-traps" that Microsoft installs on the hard drives
and embedded into the OS itself.
This is a very technical and intentional (psychopathic) problem outside the scope
of this thread, but the point is, Acronis works. Do not deal with Norton Ghost v15 - they
caused me 1 month of grief and destroyed my OS (on a test system) and it was
not worth it. Bottom line is, Acronis saved me grief beyond measure as my daughter's
(and mine) system (a multi-boot system w/ XP/Vista/Fedora-9/Ubuntu 9.10 with windows
and Linux Apps partitions) is fully recovered with new drives. For extra measure, I bought
a 2nd drive (overkill?) and semi-mirrored the drive, which means, I can boot off the
1st or 2nd drive and grab important files off the failing drive and safely replace
the failing drive.
So to re-iterate, Xp/Vista may or may not have S.M.A.R.T technology installed
to clearly warn it's users, right away, of a failing or failed drive and to always stay
popped up, until the drive is replaced.
The trick is, catching the warning message, if you happened to be watching,
in the case of pop-ups, or check the log files, and to locate any SMART drive
warnings - and hopefully, you won't suddenly lose your hard drive, to be left
empty-handed.
I am sure there are other ways to do things, but this is just my particular
case and how I effectively dealt with this issue.
Here is an example of SMART HDD failure detection on Fedora-11:
{This was part of my entropic experience, as noted in the FOTCM
membership thread}
FWIW,
Dan