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The drive I dedicated to my Daz Runtime suffered some kind of head crash and then poof 2TB mostly unreadable. All 1TB of content irretrievable. All my custom characters, all my organization; Daz, RDNA, Xurge, M2, M3, M4, G1, G2, G3, G8 = All Gone. 20 years of content. No backup.
Ironically, I have all my exe installs, zips, rars - thousands of add-ons. I got those backed up, twice.
I feel so betrayed by my computer.
I've replaced the drive - now I'm just procrastinating and debating where to start.
Sorry to hear, truly. I've been there, I had an entire library of Poser stuff and custom characters back then and lost it all. When I came back, many many years later, I finally switched to Daz Studio, and boy am I glad I did.
Now I backup my custom library in OneDrive (6 TB for a personal account), and the rest in various cloud services. I recently built my custom NAS server but it has proven to be rather unreliable, so I'll stick to cloud for the time being.
@athos711 and @cantonesejim, I read an article a while back about hard drive failure modes and according to them (they used a lot of data from BackBlaze), a head physically contacting the disc is extremely rare. It takes a hard drop or a physical failure of the arm or bearings. The most frequent cause is a failure or glitch in the firmware that controls the drive, or a motor fault. There's lots of stories and repair schemes on Hackaday (https://hackaday.com/blog/?s=hard+drive+repair+firmware). It's not suggested that you try any of these repairs but they make for interesting reading. There's one in the links where someone replaces the controller to get a drive working again.
I have a drive of not only just DAZ content, but 3D models, projects, scene files, configurations and more. All that stuff can fit onto a 4TB drive nicely.
But it can also fail just as nicely too! Not only will the just the amount of information I'd lose be heart crushing, but the amount of time I spend over the years on that content drive!
Anytime you have data with much time is spent upon it, you must back it up! The amount of time spent will be subjective to each individual, but what matters is when that personal threshold of yours is crossed, you start the backups!
If you bought a 4TB drive to store all your work for easy access, then you buy another one to backup your information as it is all vulnerable to loss! If you can't purchase two 4TB drives, then buy what you can and start marking what is mission critical!
Always backup your data! Especially if it becomes large! The larger the data for most, the larger the heartache will be once lost!
I've been using PC's for over forty years and have lost a drive or two. Some were backed up and some weren't. Some backups worked and some didn't. Backing up is good, but you also need to occasionally test the backups.
I now have all my important data on a pair of 8TB drives configured as a RAID 1 (mirrored) array. As long as only one drive goes bad I'm good. I still need to do regular backups to be really covered, but I'm fairly safe from hardware failure.
@stickduck While that's a good setup, it's definitely not foolproof. I've seen many times where the board that the drives were connected to got fried and also fried drive components along with it. Also seen times when data corruption occurred (either through hardware fault or software error), but when one drive was scrambled, the other one mirrored it and was also scrambled. Rare things, but i've seen it happen many times. Safest route is to keep an external copy that is not constantly connected. Store offsite or in a fireproof safe/case (yeah even saw companies had fires wipe out all their data AND backups because they were right there on the shelf)
I had nightmare of hard drive fail of entire digital id contents and Gov documentts. I had a older back up of the failed drive and was very happy again but was horrified to have the drive fail 3 days later. I now use the cloud for back ups.
Oh, man. That's a total nightmare to me, and it explains why I am a fanatic about backups.
A strong suggestion:
1. Get FreeFileSync (https://freefilesync.org/). It is, as the title suggests, free, and more importantly, it also does batch jobs that can be called from Task Scheduler.
2. Buy an external USB disk 2x bigger than the amount of stuff you're backing up.
3. Learn Task Scheduler in Windows. You can use it to run those generated batch backup jobs from the FFS application.
Or, let me save you the headache of looking it up, because FFS has the full instructions here: https://freefilesync.org/manual.php?topic=schedule-batch-jobs
I use it on my local desktop to back up to a USB disk. BUT, I also share my vital drives over the local network, so that my backup server can reach out and use the same method to back up my data remotely (protip: copy the stuff over USB first, then physically move the disk to the backup server).
My backup server is a cheapie $300 Intel NUC-based rig with a really fat pair of 6TB USB drives plugged into it. The only thing it does is to reach out to my shared drives across multiple computers, and pull data from them (this 'pull' architecture avoids spreading any malware and keeps the backup data relatively clean.) It has FreeFileSync, and Task Scheduler, and nothing else. Once every couple of weeks, I remote into it to look around and make sure there were no errors in Task Scheduler, and sample a couple of disks to ensure that the data is making it over.
My backups run automatically every night to the local USB disk, and automatically runs 2-3x a week from the remote backup server (it depends... the ancient Poser stuff backs up once a week, the more active stuff backs up every night.) If I have a crash, the local USB disk has full backups. If I get malware, the most I lose is 1-2 days worth of stuff, and it just becomes a minor inconvenience.
SSDs are pretty cheap now
and I am starting to use them for everything
they are rapid and reliable
a good external SSD is fast enough
to do almost anything you want
straight off the drive
and no worries if you drop the thing on the floorData recovery service is worth thinking about
Head crashes are rare but other things can go wrong
Not cheap but might save your stuff
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