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I faced that kind of emergency the other day with an employee who's external HD failed.
The data on the drive was so valuable to him that we shipped it to Australia (we don't have that kind of services locally) along with a new 2TB drive and had it recovered by a specialized company.
Total cost was 1.100 Australian dollars but he was happy to recover 100% of his data.In case of a technical failure, all is not lost, provided you want to put in the extra money.
Is a DAZ library and a decade a personal art worth it ? That's up to you to answer that question, I just wanted to let you know that a dead mechanical hard drive is rarely truly beyond recovery.Cheers
Math
Lost everything today. My one year old 18TB hdd crashed during a write action. I have a backup of the DAZ assets, but my huge unreal collection has disappeared.
I'm now trying to restore the data with an old tool getdataback. Just searching 18TB takes a day. Normally I always make a backup, but the backup HDD was still in the packaging.Tape is a good backup media... I had a SCSI attached DAT 6 tape changer/library on a past machine. Most are SAS2 interface, so you;d need a SAS interface card and cables for your pc..
I'm building up a little NAS for the home network. With the use of SyncToy from Microsoft and a NUC with a big hard drive, I can have it reach to my desktop and copy off any new files once a day or so. That lets me sleep better at night instead of relying on a USB disk to remember to back up files to.
Tapes sound like fun until you remember that as a pirate, you will need a very large tape library, like this one https://www.techradar.com/news/one-million-tb-heres-the-worlds-highest-capacity-tape-library
That was back in the late 90's - It was an HP unit, geared for small business or base enterprise use. Got it when it was being "decommissioned" at work. HP Storage works C5716AABA.. Had an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card that it attached to, with a 16GB external SCSI RAID setup on the same chain.. It took 6 DAT dds4 tapes in a cartridge. I think the max was 20GB per tape. PC was an old Dell dual Pentium III workstation.
There are some of those drives online, refurbished, but you;d need a SCSI card as well.
I didn't see anybody mentioning RAID constructions here
It might be a bit expensive to set up ( you need at least 3 HD's or more), But you will be able to replace a broken HD, and the RAID will automaticly resore the lost data.
Downside is you have less storage capability because if you have 3 x1 TB disks, you will only have 2 TB storage, but you will never lose any dataYou can get by with two disks for RAID (lvl 1 - mirroring) and it will work just fine, but you'll only get 50% capacity since you're literally duplicating bits across two disks.
Personally, I'm building a rig that has a Raspberry Pi with a couple of HDDs hanging on it that will act as a file server. It is trivial to set up a samba client and have it periodically synchronize its local directories from shared drives on my desktops, laptops, and stuff. I can install Sweetch on my phone (which makes my phone a mini web server) and have it sync stuff from that over wifi as needed.
This gives me at least an automatic backup rig, and since it only runs once a day each night and only pulls instead of having data pushed to it, I don't have to worry too much about it being poisoned by malware.
The weirdest SCSI problem In ever had was with a 4-drive external SCSI array - it started to randomly disconnect and disappear , only to reconnect after a short time.. and this drove me crazy..
Remember these? SCSI termination resistors!
Well, turns out that one of the pins on one of the resistors was broke, way up near where it entered the resistor pack. Vibration or heqt was causing it to shift every once in a while, and break the SCSI chain.- so the controller assumed there was nothing attached - after a bit it would shift back just enough to complete the chain..We used to get stuff like this on aircraft avionics. Freeze spray solved a lot of these problems while contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer. The early stuff was pure freon.
Yep. You didn't have to worry as much about chafing with a scsi cable, though.
(I miss the cleaning solution the most - Trichloroethane. That stuff would strip dirt and grease off of anything it was even placed near.)
I remember the resistor packs. Some disks had a DIP switch that you could use to do the same thing (and often had another switch set to determine what ID number it was going to have. they cost a ransom, though.)
What was even more surprising was that in my possibles box I still had those 3 resistors.. I seemed to remember I had some, so wen;t looking..
in a similar vintage vein I still have this (left over from the 70's)
FIRST... have you taken the DRIVE to a REPAIR SHOP? Often the electronics or the head are busted, and they can transfer the platens to another donor drive. You can then copy off what you want. (I dropped a laptop once.)
SECOND.. Make sure you use lots of floppy disk hardener. That will keep your disks from breaking.
THIRD.. I keep two backups on site, 2 on my PC (my installed library), and 2 on my server (Raw install files). I use a program called SyncFolders to do this.
FOURTH... Synology NAS systems can easily backup, and manage your backups at home or offsite. They are affordable, and you can set them up to remote snarfle up all your data and keep multiple locations instantly up to date. (I was looking at them for backup up stuff at my office.. I was surprised at what they could do.)
"This sounds like a challenge. I have a 5 1/4 floppy hanging on my wall with Dos5 on it but that’s not really that old. I must have a punch card somewhere"
punch cards - yeah I have a deck of them, as well as an 8" floppy.. and this..
IBM card saw... a most useful tool back in the day..
As many other have noted using on site backups.
I have over 5TB of library contents from probably about 18 years of collecting. Really should go through and remove a lot of pre-genesis stuff as I rarely ever use any of it anymore. I have 2 8TB internal drives in RAID 1 plus 2 external 8TB drives. One of the externals resides in my safe deposit box where I keep my important paperwork, one sits in a box in the closet. Anything I add is also written/sorted to a 1TB thumb drive based on my custom sorting scheme, can't believe how cheap those are now. Once every 6 months, I pull out the one in the closet, hook it up and copy over any changes from the thumb drive. Even if there are none, I still run it briefly as it's not a good idea to let your mechanical hard drives sit out of use for long periods of time. I then take it to the bank, swap it with the other one and bring that home and copy the changes. I have lost my entire library due to drive failure twice before I started doing this. I said to myself that if it ever happened again I was done so I made sure it would never happen again.
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