Kawi2strokes.com Forum

I bought my first computer in 1984 (and still have it per my youtube booting it up last year).

I’ve never lost any data, never had a drive fail until now (my 2-year old Seagate external Hard Drive crapped out). I did have a flash drive fail once from unplugging it from the USB port instead of “safely removing it” as your supposed to do (there’s a little icon on the bottom right of your task bar) that says “safely remove hardware or eject media”.

These external drives (1 or 2 terabyte are cheap) come with really awful backup software. I had the segate and I just bout a western digital – same basic stuff. You can’t set a time for the backup to run or a day even so during the day it would run several times and even with my quad-core mega PC I noticed a slight slow-down – I’m sure it’s worse with an older machine. My fix was to pause the backup and do my other stuff on the pc.

The backup software does not backup your whole drive each time – after the initial backup the software looks for any files that have changed and backs them up. They also offer a “Image Restore” similar to a Norton Ghost but I never use it.
The Seagate was the worst software, maybe because it was 2 years old but it did not give the option to specify a directory – the WD does though.

Here’s a tip – I NEVER keep my files in the default Windows folder like My Pictures, My Videos, My Documents etc. The backup software defaults to these locations, many programs you run default to the locations – I use my own directory somewhere outside of the Windows dir.

Two Reasons:
1) If you ever need to reload Windows because it’s Windows and will screw up eventually – you can reinstall the operating system on top of itself again (you’re not supposed to but I’ve done it hundreds of times). However, if you keep your files in My Documents and other default dirs – reinstalling the OS will wipe out your data when it rebuilds the default folders.

2) If you have your own directory and subdirectories – like c:/barry main/barry documents etc when you reinstall windows it won’t touch your files.

2.1) If you have backup software that’s decent you can specify the folder or folders you want - like my new WD software does - although it sucks as far as software goes.

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So my backups appear to have been running on the old Seagate drive fine, occasionally I would copy something to it manually from another machine etc so I know it worked plus the program would show backing up files during the day - I never gave it a second thought.

Thursday I noticed my machine was incredibly slow, like I lost some ram or CPU issues etc. Oh Oh, I’m thinking the worst and maybe re-installing Windows-7 Ultimate (I run the big Kahuna).

I tried looking into the Seagate to check some stuff – my PC was timing out getting to it, had to force a hard shut-down by holding the power button in. It did this three times when I tried to get to the Seagate – then windows said it was really hosed and needed to use a restore point (oh oh again, I’ve never had luck with those)… But I did and got it going again.

I plugged the Seagate into two others PC’s – they all could not reach the Seagate and would hang the PC trying to read from it. OK Seagate is FUBAR.

I also notice my machine is back to normal speed without it – and with the new Western Digital drive too. So the Seagate was causing my machine to run slow when it died – probably some technical reason I don’t care about – it was messed up – I’m moving on.

So the moral is I not only backup to these external drives but I also backup to DVDs as a data medium. You can get 7 or 8 GIG on a DVD or now 32 Gig on flash drives but I don’t trust them either.

I back up my documents on a DVD easily and a few selected directories or pictures and a few videos. I believe nothing is a better backup than a DVD/CD. I remember RB loosing his external drives and a lot of stuff a few years ago, I believe it was an electrical issue – and we get lightening here in Colorado that could ZAP my electronics even through my fairly decent surge protectors. No battery backup “yet”.

I no longer use any backup software routines. Once a month I backup my works laptop to another file server I have and I manually copy my Barry directory to the new Western Digital – 590gig takes 90 minutes on USB 2.0 port. I also power off the external drive when not in use.

So that’s my Tip For The Day – DON’T TRUST EXTERNAL DRIVES. They're as good as they're supposed to be but that's it.

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This is true. Where I grew up the hills were so steep and long, when your ball rolled down the hill you just said "screw it"...

Try http://SugarSync.com

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Answers are here: http://kawatriple.com/

Not doing anything off-site dale. I could all kinds of other things like external sata and much more but I wrote this up for the majority of people who will buy and use these things and to be aware.

I've unlimited storage and bandwidth with my host in Utah and I do back many files there and documents with PGP encryption.

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This is true. Where I grew up the hills were so steep and long, when your ball rolled down the hill you just said "screw it"...

I recently had a seagate external drive die......... was not a backup though. My daugther lost about 5000 digital pictures

Don't trust any drive. All should be backed up regularly, and the backup should be kept at a different location if there's any data there you don't want to lose.

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If it surges, that's normal, upshift.

I would never keep anything I value on a mechanical/magnetic drive. cd/dvd and several copies of those. I think they a fairly reliable. But if you have a lot of data I don't what would be best.

Don

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Don

I don't want to turn this into a geek forum but IMHO with the low price of external drives nowadays, a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) would work. Depending on your needs and budget there are several ways to do this. Data is shared/stored/mirror across several discs and if one of the fails, you just swap it out and it restores itself using mirrored data from the remaining discs. using raid 5 you can have more than 1 disc fail and still recover from it.

I just wanted people to be aware of the issues with external drives - and not to trust them 100% with your data. With most of us now in digital pictures and cameras loosing them is heartbreaking.

Two years ago when I bought the Seagate I was leery for sure - and I was right. I wanted folks here to know this.

I do backup the critical stuff - pictures of my kids growing up and some important documents to DVD and some to my hosting site because I have that option. A striped or mirrored raid array is an option for me but not worth the hassle and expense.

Bottom line for most people, the external drives are good for convenience but a sure way to save your valuable stuff is DVD's at this point.

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This is true. Where I grew up the hills were so steep and long, when your ball rolled down the hill you just said "screw it"...

I've had the reflective layer on CDs / DVDs flake after ten years or so, and render the disks useless. I don't have much experience with "archival DVDs", but I've heard they are made to be more robust for long-term storage. If you put all your eggs in one basket, expect them to get broken.

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If it surges, that's normal, upshift.

Where can I get 200 blank DVD discs cheap?.........

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Twist the throttle, tilt the horizon, and have a great time. What triples are all about...........