Saturday, August 23, 2014

Back Up Your Data Before Your Hard Drive Crashes

I sense a hard drive crash coming and have been busy backing up the drive onto a new 4TB USB 3.0 external Hard Drive. The problem is, it's taking forever. I figured it's probably crashing since it occasionally takes forever to write a Photoshop PSD file to disk and it hangs up on the last bit of every file it tries to save. It also has icons and thumbnails that sometimes show up quickly and other times take an eternity to show up. These have been my clues to the eminent hard drive failure that is most likely coming very soon. However the back up process is daunting when you are talking about large Photoshop files and videos. Each file anywhere from 20MB to 2Gigabytes a piece and an overall set of over 2TB worth of Data on each Hard Drive. It really takes forever to copy everything. 



It's been one day already and it's still only at 10%. I believe this maybe because the hard drive it's copying from maybe already on it's last leg. It was saving files very slowly for a 7200RPM hard drive that supposedly has 6GB/s Write Transfer rate over a SATA line. 

I do have some of it backed up already since originally it was a back up of another drive to begin with. It s a Toshiba 3TB drive and is only a year and a half old. Plan on getting it replaced under warranty but it's annoying that you first have to transfer everything before doing that. I personally hate backing up because I have so much damned data that it always takes more than a day to do a back up. I have learned a little from the GREAT CRASH of 2009 where I had lost 3 months of work and 4 months worth of pictures. I had Backed up to a certain point but the last few times I tried it was taking forever and I was getting read write errors during backup so I decided to postpone backing up for a later date when I would not need my computer as often, that day never came little did I know that the read write errors were because the hard drive was quickly failing and would soon become useless. 



I'm trying to be patient now and let it finish backing up but it is taking an eternity and I have to finish a few projects for clients all while hoping the computer doesn't crash and interupt my backup. So damned scary. 

PS: Online backup just isn't where it needs to be just yet I used to use my own website with secured folders for that. But my web host is mad about my bandwidth lately and most cloud storage solutions just don't cut it for 3TB-10TB worth of files and documents. Even my Drop box is currently maxed out at 10GB and my Google Drive is maxed at 16GB and that's just from sending files to clients I still don't have a non bank breaking online solution for cloud storage. Most only offer a few Gigs, I need a few Terabytes! - www.djemir.com