Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

The past nearly two years have been a a mental strain in my life. Why? Because I purchased a hard drive only to have it fail less than two months later. Well no biggie just RMA it and get a new one, right? The problem with that is the data that it held.

In November of 2007 I purchased a hard drive to be the primary resting place of all of my pictures. I had just copied all of them to it, and added 3 more months worth of pictures (Oct-December) in January of 2008 when disaster struck. Due to corruption of the disk I lost all three months worth of images that I did not have any where else. Thankfully the rest of the images were safely stored on another drive.

Since then I've upgraded to enterprise level devices because they are at least in theory higher end devices. I now have a set of Western Digital Raptor drives holding most of the data i hold near and dear to my heart.

But this is not enough. There will come a day where a drive or two or three will fail, my basement will flood, or worse yet, my house will burn to the ground. Enter Mozy. For a mere $4.95 a month you can have unlimited online storage.

Currently we are upwards of 20,000 (if not more) images and videos of the kids. Not to mention the thousands of other files we use, previous tax filings, resumes, this very application I use as my website and all of it's data, other projects, backups of the site and database. So as you can see there is quite a bit resting on the shoulders of the single computer in my basement.

Now I will say I didn't buy the Raptor drives just to keep things safe. I also did it because they are FAST! And when you are looking at thousands of images at a shot, speed is a good thing. Plus the website runs off of one of these drives and it really boosted the overall speed and ability to process images.

Of course you could use a drive recovery tool. Or even send it off to a company to be restored. When I looked into this option it was going to cost about $2,000 to recover the drive. Oh and as for the software to "do it yourself." Just remember, every time it's read from or written to, you are losing more and more data.

With the cost of storage at an all time low (pennies per gigabyte) and the amount of data we are now keeping on our computers keeps increasing it's only a matter of time before Murphy's Law kicks in and crashes a drive. Or you delete a file by mistake. So be smart. Get a nice little backup drive and routine locally. Then buy into an online backup solution for that 'just in case' event. Because after all, you never know when issues will happen so be prepared. As for my hard drive that failed, it's still sitting in it's box waiting to be recovered.