Sneak Attack

[R. Richard]

Either my hard drive deliberately and maliciously committed suicide or the fascist pigs committed a sneak attack. I'm slowly rebuilding things and this is a test post.

(People will tell you that I'm paranoid. Don't listen to them, they're all against me.)

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Either my hard drive deliberately and maliciously committed suicide or the fascist pigs committed a sneak attack. I'm slowly rebuilding things and this is a test post.

(People will tell you that I'm paranoid. Don't listen to them, they're all against me.)

I had one crap out on me not long ago...as far as I know there isn't a virus or trojan that will cause a HDD to die. There are those that make them do funny things and corrupt data and so forth, but die...no.

How old was the drive in question? How long had it been running without a break?

I shut my computer down once a week and leave it off all night. Other than that it is going 24/6.5.

Good luck

 

[R. Richard]

How old was the drive in question? How long had it been running without a break?

I shut my computer down once a week and leave it off all night. Other than that it is going 24/6.5.

Good luck

The drive was about two years old. I shut the computer down each night.

 

[49greg]

I think it's time I did a complete back up.

 

[Handley_Page]

My PC gets switched off about once a fortnight.
And not usually for long.
It runs "Folding at Home". It used to run SETI.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The drive was about two years old. I shut the computer down each night.

Yeah there are two thoughts on how computers should be handled.

1. shut them down when done with them for the day

2. leave them running,
....a. have windows take care of shutting down the drive, nic, etc. when in the green mode.
....b. just leave everything run, all the time.

Disk drives...have in the hundreds of thousands hours MTBF, but you could get, but you could always get one that doesn't live up to the mean.

The one that failed on me was five years old. In the beginning of its life it was shutdown each night. In it's later years it was running 24/7/52.

The damn thing would spin up, you could hear it, it just wouldn't read. It didn't crash, it just gave up.

Now I have two, terrabyte drives. They spin 24/7/52 almost, except for that one day a mouth I just shut everything down.

 

[R. Richard]

One of the problems where I now love is that power sometimes goes out, frequently in the idle of the night. If my system is shut down, I take less damage.
(I have an LED alarm clock, with no battery. I also have a local alarm clock that operates in a sort of magical basis. You wind up a sort of key on the back and it runs, even if there's an overnight power failure.)

 

[SandraMustard]

We had a PC that ran non-stop 6 yrs except for occasional shutdowns. Then I started getting file corruption. I should have been proactive. When the corruption occurred in the boot sector, the PC was toast. I was able to read the disk for most files with direct cables.

AR

 

[Swilly]

I always recommend backing up to a local drive on a regular basis. In addition, I suggest an off site backup. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and others make it very easy to do that seamlessly and without effort. Anything that is sensitive can be stored in an encrypted container and will back up that way. The beauty of those services is that you set it up and forget it. Save files to those folders and they are always backed up off site and accessible from anywhere.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

One of the problems where I now love is that power sometimes goes out, frequently in the idle of the night. If my system is shut down, I take less damage.
(I have an LED alarm clock, with no battery. I also have a local alarm clock that operates in a sort of magical basis. You wind up a sort of key on the back and it runs, even if there's an overnight power failure.)

Do you have a surge protector on it? How about an uninterruptable power supply?

The APC's are really cheap....

APCs.....

I used to have an old Compaq Pro machine. It was a work machine and when it outlived its usefulness at work, the boss gave it to me. I hooked it up and converted it to a file server at home. I eventually had 10 2gigbyte diskdrives hooked up in it. (This was back when 2 gig was a lot of disk space)

It ran 24/7 except those time windows wanted to update the OS. Those 2 gig drives never quit, never stopped, never missed a bit.

Tossed it in a move...keep the drives and eventually moved all the data to a single 100 gig drive that I have since lost somewhere. Fortunately, the data had been saved on CD as backup...so I still have the data.

 

[R. Richard]

Do you have a surge protector on it? How about an uninterruptable power supply?

The APC's are really cheap....

Yes, I have a good surge protector on the line.
Down here, an APC (UPC) is several tines what Amazon wants and, Amazon won't ship here. I can get Chinese UPCs, but they're expensive and shipping to Belize is also very expensive.

 

[legerdemer]

It runs "Folding at Home".

How good of you!!! Really!!!

 

[SandraMustard]

It runs "Folding at Home".

How good of you!!! Really!!!

So I had to Google what that was about. No wonder your interest, leger.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Yes, I have a good surge protector on the line.
Down here, an APC (UPC) is several tines what Amazon wants and, Amazon won't ship here. I can get Chinese UPCs, but they're expensive and shipping to Belize is also very expensive.

Yeah, there is that problem when you're on the run.

 

[Handley_Page]

Yes, I have a good surge protector on the line.
Down here, an APC (UPC) is several tines what Amazon wants and, Amazon won't ship here. I can get Chinese UPCs, but they're expensive and shipping to Belize is also very expensive.

Very prudent, I think.
I made mine and set it tight.
All in all, there are about 3 between raw mains and the PC.

 

[Mister_Chris]

There was actually a virus that was designed to do physical damage to a hard drive. What it did was move the actuator arm on the drive to the outermost circumference of the disc, and then slam it in to the innermost circumference... and then repeat that action in a loop, as fast as possible. It burned out the stepper motors in the drive. However, that was perhaps 20 years ago. Back when I was in the game. And I haven't heard of anything like that since.

A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a good idea... but I understand the concerns regarding expense. I wonder if a friend in a more Amazon friendly country might ship it to you - or perhaps you might be able to find a drop shipper.

(Belize isn't all that far from the Amazon - and I find it ironic that Amazon won't ship to the Amazon. Bizarre.)

Most of the Chinese electronics I've found is 240 Volt, 50 CPS. If that's what you need in Belize, all is well. I would also be concerned about the quality of the sine wave from a Chinese UPS; American Power Corporation (APC) generates a true synthetic sine wave, but some UPS's deliver a modified sine wave (also known as a bullshit sine wave, basically a pulsed square wave). That can chew up the power supply in the computer; the transformer gets jolted 60 times a second, instead of gracefully sliding in and out of action.

And I should note that, if you're using a laptop, you effectively already have a UPS built in. All laptops always run off their batteries; when they're plugged in, the charger is just keeping the battery charged up, not running the computer directly. The computer itself is never running off of the mains power. It's always running off its own battery.

Another option to enhance data permanence is setting up a RAID 1 array. Many motherboards, particularly boards made in the last 3 or 4 years, support them. In a RAID 1 array, you have two physical hard drives in the case, and data gets written to each drive on a constant basis. Should a drive die, you'll get a warning at start up that one of the drives is dead; however, your computer will start and function normally. You can then shut down and remove the dead drive at your leisure, and replace it with another drive. RAID 1 is essentially a continuous, uncompressed, complete hard drive backup. It also carries with it the bonus that when you read from the drive, data streams off both drives at once; and this results in a doubling of hard drive read speeds.

I used to be a big fan of both RAID 0 and RAID 5; I no longer am. But RAID 1, while somewhat expensive, is the safest and most convenient. It is also the only form of RAID in which a drive can be removed, put in another computer, and be read normally by a normal (non-raid) SATA controller.

And of course you can always run an automated periodic backup program, such as Retrospect.

The brand of hard drive actually makes a difference. The most reliable drives are Hitachi; the least reliable are Seagate. Western Digital are somewhere in between. Seagates will last for a year (typically) while WDs will deliver 2 or 3 years. YMMV. A lot.

Online storage carries with it the convenience of being able to access your data from anywhere, and the knowledge that the loss of your data is much less likely.

The biggest problem is internet service provider bandwidth caps. I pay around $80 a month for a package with a 500 gigabyte cap. It sounds like a lot, but if I'm backing up a lot of data, I can burn through a lot of capacity. (And if you use streaming services like NetFlix or a playstation account, those burn through a surprising amount of capacity).

Transfer speed is also a factor. My package has a maximum transfer rate of 100 megabits per second - roughly 10 megabytes per second, once parity calculations are thrown in. If I'm backing up my 4 gigabyte copy of 'The Seven Sins of Sexy Sadie', it'll take about 7 minutes. Not terrible - if I'm only backing up 1 file. But I also have the six 'Sadie' prequels, and other stuff as well. It can get cumbersome.

I also worry about security. I encrypt locally and bounce off a proxy in Zurich, I use 'Better Privacy' to notify me about Locally Stored Objects (supercookies) and I run different scans to try and identify 'evercookies' (malignant cookies that restore themselves like virus infestations)... and it's still not enough. It's never enough. Despite whatever other damage he may have done, we can at least thank Mr. Snowden for bringing security to the forefront.

I'm thinking about shifting over to Linux... but I'm not sure that it's more secure. And Windows 7 is so damned convenient. (I thought win 8.x was awful, and Win 10 doesn't look a whole lot better; but that discussion is completely off topic).

Anyway. That's what I can contribute regarding data storage. Peace - MC

 

[Handley_Page]

A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a good idea... but I understand the concerns regarding expense. I wonder if a friend in a more Amazon friendly country might ship it to you - or perhaps you might be able to find a drop shipper.

(Belize isn't all that far from the Amazon - and I find it ironic that Amazon won't ship to the Amazon. Bizarre.)

Most of the Chinese electronics I've found is 240 Volt, 50 CPS. If that's what you need in Belize, all is well. I would also be concerned about the quality of the sine wave from a Chinese UPS; American Power Corporation (APC) generates a true synthetic sine wave, but some UPS's deliver a modified sine wave (also known as a bullshit sine wave, basically a pulsed square wave). That can chew up the power supply in the computer; the transformer gets jolted 60 times a second, instead of gracefully sliding in and out of action.

Anyway. That's what I can contribute regarding data storage. Peace - MC

There's a trick for such ghastly so-called sine waves.
You need an intermediate transformer. The extra iron will round the waveform thing off in a significant manner.

 

[RejectReality]

Oddly enough, I've never lost a drive despite having a computer continuously since the mid 90s. The computer I had before this one ran almost continuously for better than seven years -- often running games it wasn't really designed to handle.

The motherboard crapped out on me, but I pulled the drive and it's sitting in an enclosure hooked up to my new PC by USB right now ( though turned off, because I've copied pretty much everything to the new drive )

The worst thing I've had was when my wife was accepting a picture from someone over one of the messenger services and it was corrupted with a virus. Corrupted every single .jpg on the system, including every single girl/girl shot we'd ever taken of her

Plenty of people had archives of most of her pictures, and I had almost all of my stuff backed up on CDs, but those girl/girl shots were lost forever. Both of the other girls had quit camming and we'd lost contact with them.

 

[lovecraft68]

I have two USB sticks and one is kept at my sisters house-in case of fire.

I have everything backed up on cuteftp and every time I finish a story I e-mail the doc to myself and put it in a folder in my yahoo so I could always get them that way as well.

 

[RejectReality]

I've been using an online backup service for a couple of years now, so everything I can't reinstall is safely stored in the event of an emergency -- from drafts in progress right down to save files on video games.

 

[Handley_Page]

I use a separate hard drive and a DVD for back-ups.

 

[litmlove]

@R.Richard

Although you expect a drive to last 5 years, sometimes they don't

Usually you there are warning signs your hard drive is failing.
- random freezing, BSOD (blue screen of death), randomly slowing down to a crawl
- many corrupted files (use the Admin tools to check if you have many bad sectors)
- Noise: spinning inappropriately at high speeds, stop and starting (with the clicking), grinding

If your files are very important you could take the drive to a professional to do a manual read. Otherwise if you mount the drive in another computer you can use software programs. Personally I don't trust the software recovery programs because they are only useful to a limited degree (and can cause data loss).

My PC gets switched off about once a fortnight.
And not usually for long.
It runs "Folding at Home". It used to run SETI.

If F@H makes you feel useful, sure, go ahead. IMO it's a waste of electricity on inefficient computing. :S

 

[Mister_Chris]

There's a trick for such ghastly so-called sine waves.
You need an intermediate transformer. The extra iron will round the waveform thing off in a significant manner.

So, take the modified sine wave and plug it into a transformer?

That's actually quite slick. I hardly ever encounter a new idea. But to me, that's new. Good one.

I suppose you could use two transformers - one to drop the voltage down, and one to bring it back up. Probably not real efficient, but certainly cheap to implement.

I wish I still had a scope. I'd love to look at that waveform.

Helluva neat idea.

>MC

 

[Mister_Chris]

BTW, one of my earlier posts was way, way too long. Bad case of verbal diarrhea. Sorry about that.

Optical DVDs burned on home computers use a dye that is sensitive to red (I think it's actually infra-red, but I can no longer remember) laser light. The problem is that the dye that wasn't burned, eventually will be, by normal exposure to the environment; and the dye that was burned, will fade. So, all the zeroes and ones meld together, and the disk becomes unreadable. This means that optical CDs and DVDs should only be considered as temporary storage.

Many people think that a CD they've burned on their computer is as permanent as a CD they buy at the music store. Not so; two completely different processes.

And I've exceeded my mandatory three paragraph rule, so I have to go away now. >MC

 

[litmlove]

BTW, one of my earlier posts was way, way too long. Bad case of verbal diarrhea. Sorry about that.

Optical DVDs burned on home computers use a dye that is sensitive to red (I think it's actually infra-red, but I can no longer remember) laser light. The problem is that the dye that wasn't burned, eventually will be, by normal exposure to the environment; and the dye that was burned, will fade. So, all the zeroes and ones meld together, and the disk becomes unreadable. This means that optical CDs and DVDs should only be considered as temporary storage.

Many people think that a CD they've burned on their computer is as permanent as a CD they buy at the music store. Not so; two completely different processes.

And I've exceeded my mandatory three paragraph rule, so I have to go away now. >MC

If you can't write walls of text in The "Author's Hangout" then we are all screwed

But yeah, you are correct; you need to store optical disks you create in cool, dry and dark places (in the cases they come with?) and replace them every few years.

FWIW The gold standard for digital storage is Digital Magnetic Tape. You can do long term storage with normal Hard Drives & Flash Memory but there is a small&serious risk that you will be unable to recover any data from them (more particularly with flash memory: eg. SS drives).