Major computer crash

[Norseman]

Yours truly is returning online after his D: drive decided to conk out. 48 hours of chkdsk later I am told I have over two gigabytes of bad sectors on my drive. I am just glad that chkdsk appear to have recovered the drive enough that I can back it up and migrate my data elsewhere.

So if anyone was wondering why I've been so quiet now you know.

[Josh]

I was sort of wondering. Sucks about the data loss, hope you're able to recover all your important files and porn.

[Stofsk]

Out of curiosity, how do you know your HDD is on the way to an early grave? What are the signs? Is it a gradual process or sudden death sort of thing?

[Batman]

As of Win7 the OS tends to tell you when it thinks your harddrive is dying (in my personal case it seems to be wrong-so far-but you know what they say about annecdotal evidence) and I think 2000 and XP did too.

[B4UTRUST]

Out of curiosity, how do you know your HDD is on the way to an early grave? What are the signs? Is it a gradual process or sudden death sort of thing?

Most versions of Windows OS anymore have an application called chkdsk.exe which scans your drives for bad sectors. It can fix some problems and errors found on drives but not all of them. When you start picking up bad sectors that can't be repaired then you know your drive is starting to have a few issues. Keeping an eye on this will at least give you a possible means to see if your drive is about ready to commit seppuku. Bats is also correct in that newer WinOS systems have active hard drive health monitors that can tell you if your drive is starting to fail. Of course that's a software based analysis of the drive and there could be issues not detectable by these. But it at least gives you a shot at seeing it starting to degrade so you can backup your data. Unless you're like me of course and simply have so much damned data that backups are nigh impossible...

[Norseman]

I did do a chkdsk once I started having serious problems. The thing is though that chkdsk takes forever on a large disk so I tended to not bother with it. Then I got serious problems and couldn't backup all my content, so I did a chkdsk which took four days to complete. Afterwards the HDD seemed to work fine (though 2 gigabytes out of 1500 were permanently disabled), but I didn't take any chances and replaced the whole thing.

So yeah... I got no warning before stuff just stopped working.

In short you should do frequent backups! At least of all your important files!

[White Haven]

It varies a lot. Sometimes you have no warning, it just freaks the fuck out and packs in. Other times you'll notice freezes here and there, usually during drive-access-heavy applications (virus scans freezing are a red flag, watch for this). Additionally, drives will sometimes shit themselves after virus scans/defrags/that sort of thing, due to drive access to areas of the drive that have been actually bad for a while, but that haven't caused problems because they were empty or contained unused data (old programs you don't use, etc). That often leads my customers to ask if the virus actually caused the damage, and believe me, I'm tired of that conversation...

If you check the event log, sometimes you'll see errors there about bad blocks and red failures and such. Again, a red flag, and one that's not necessarily immediately obvious. The Intel monitoring utility (if you have an Intel board) tracks hard drive read and write errors against reporting thresholds, as do some other hardware-monitoring programs. What it really comes down to, though, is that anything you really don't want to lose had better not be in only one place, ever, or it's as good as fucked in the long term. Sooner or later, you're going to have a storage failure of some sort; some people are lucky enough to run into a recoverable one, others...well, I had a lady at work with twelve years of her small business's Quickbooks data on a single old-ass desktop. The hard drive failed, and failed hard. She ended up paying OnTrack something like 2-3 thousand dollars to recover it for her. My sympathy meter read fucking zero for that one.

[B4UTRUST]

See, I have a problem with backing up my data. I just happen to have so much of it that keeping backups isn't practical right now. We're talking between all the computers 15+ terabytes of data.

[Norseman]

See, I have a problem with backing up my data. I just happen to have so much of it that keeping backups isn't practical right now. We're talking between all the computers 15+ terabytes of data.

If I were a betting man I would guess that 90% of that is movies and music, am I right? If so most of that stuff just needs to be backed up once. You can probably shave off a few terabytes by carefully eliminating duplicated material during the backup. For the most part it's not like you'd really need multiple versions.

Then afterwards you can just occasionally back up chatlogs and work related files, documents and the like, which should be far less material.

[frigidmagi]

You know I don't keep movies on my computer, they're on a separate harddrive. I thought that's what most of us did now. Although now that you mentioned it, I do need to update my backup harddrive on that...

Music I do keep on the computer, I should maybe move that to... Hmmm.

[Batman]

Given harddrive sizes these days (and the availability and size of things to download) pretty much the only way to back up your data is another harddrive. Calculate the number of DVD-Rs it'd take to back up a single measly TB.

[B4UTRUST]

See, I have a problem with backing up my data. I just happen to have so much of it that keeping backups isn't practical right now. We're talking between all the computers 15+ terabytes of data.

If I were a betting man I would guess that 90% of that is movies and music, am I right? If so most of that stuff just needs to be backed up once. You can probably shave off a few terabytes by carefully eliminating duplicated material during the backup. For the most part it's not like you'd really need multiple versions.

Then afterwards you can just occasionally back up chatlogs and work related files, documents and the like, which should be far less material.

You'd be close to correct. My media computer is now over 12tb and all it is is movies, tv shows and music. No duplicate files. No way to shave off terabytes. The other desktop is just an extra that I have set up to run game servers mostly.

[Josh]

...and here I thought around a terabyte and a half of movies and tv shows was a collection.