The Five Stages of Data Loss Grief

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I don't think there is a single person reading this that hasn’t went through THIS at some point. Personally, after losing a hard drive to the click of death, I now have a 1TB back up drive for my 1TB back up drive. :D

Stage Four: Depression. "All those photos. I'll never, ever get them back. I'll never see those faces again. And my essays from college, I was going to share those with my kids someday. And man, all that music, it's taken me years to collect all that. Why did I even bother? It's like the last ten years of my life have just been erased."
Click to expand...
 
I have been a lucky one having never gone through a data loss. I have worked on to many people's PC's that have and started a long time ago with backups of backups. I try and keep everything in triplicate. One copy goes to an internal HDD, another to an external HDD, then a 3rd goes onto DVD's and put into a fire resistant lock box. It is mostly just pictures and financial stuff. There are lots of other things I dont worry about as they are replaceable whereas pictures are not. Its cheap insurance to do it when you see how much data recovery can cost.
 
I am so going home and running through my backup routine. Have been really lazy, and not backed anything up for over a month!
 
I went through this despite the fact that all my data was stored on a NAS RAID5 array...the drives in the array were actually fine, but the enclosure's controller died! Luckily the manufacturer felt pity for my situation and shipped a replacement enclosure which solved the problem.

My current backup solution includes having everything stored on the Windows Home Server (folder duplication enabled) with nightly replication (using MS Synctoy) to the NAS unit which is still RAID5. The panic of data loss is something I am not eager to re-live again.
 
Blauman,

I do the same... unfortunately a fire will still destroy all 3 of those things. (those safe's don't protect optical media from the heat of a fire.) I know I have to make an offsite backup at some point.

What are some free upload / back up sites? I think Google has something don't they? I guess I should start doing some research. If nothing else backup my pictures. Conceptually I can replace my music and videos (at cost hopefully covered by insurance), but the pictures are irreplaceable I currently have some 24,000 pictures..
 
My absolute essentials have been backed up online for some time. I have no worries.
 
I don't show up in photos so I'm good on the pictures part.

I did lose some good brainstorm text documents when I was in like middle or high school though. A lot of those ideas never came back. :(

Since then I've kept a text archive that I moved around between HDDs as I went from major upgrade to upgrade.
 
I keep copy of important stuff (MP3's) on Wife's HD and Her Portable HD. Then Spare has same files and yet another Portable HD. Then at Sister In Law's House guess what's there?

Portable HD with those files. Too much work to rip all those CD's again.

Pictures I have taken are the BIG problem. I think it's 600g+. Takes forever to copy them if I do a big backup (format and start over).

Only downside is Fire or Thieft.

Can't wait until faster USB arrives at my house (Portable HD, Computers).

DM
 
nubbin77 said:
Blauman,

I do the same... unfortunately a fire will still destroy all 3 of those things. (those safe's don't protect optical media from the heat of a fire.) I know I have to make an offsite backup at some point
Click to expand...

Agreed with the fire, but it is a portable one that is easy to carry. So hopefully in the event that one does happen I can get to it and carry it out.
 
I just back up out of habit every week or so. I've already been through this nightmare and believe me, when you've spent nearly $2k to retrieve data, it's a nightmare.
 
Actually, I was going to say that this almost makes SSD's worth the money. Is there anything short of physical damage, deliberate format, or EMP that can lose data on an SSD?
 
For my pictures (I don't have as many as some of you) I keep them on a usb stick attached to my car keys. Most of the time they are off-site and in the event of a fire they are right next to the front door and I'd probably grab them on the way out.
 
I keep pics and docs or anything important in my Skydrive,
 
Yes I went through all of that, lost all sorts of footage, data, pictures, software and everything on a raid 0 array using Seagate (NEVER AGAIN!)
Now I switched to WD and couldn't be happier!
 
I remember when I accidentally deleted my music folder on my laptop's hard drive, I went through every stage except Acceptance, I remembered I had my unused for months iPod that had all my music on it and I immediately googled for a way to get my music collection off it without needing iTunes.

Needless to say, iDumped (literally) everything off my iPod to my laptop then backed it all up on my external.

Whew! Cheat Death +1.
 
The acceptance stage has yet to come and its been about 2 years since I lost a ton of good pictures from when I toured the country and Europe (including the west side of the Grand Canyon when it was free and the natives didn't charge you an arm and a leg just to see it). Data lost was on a WD external drive no less.

Running Seagate 2x1tb Raid 1 array atm. Not quite too paranoid to make offsite/out-of-case backups yet.

If my current array were to completely fail due to w/e and completely lose storage I'll definitely get the backup works and a literal tinfoil hat. :eek:
 
shlooky said:
Yes I went through all of that, lost all sorts of footage, data, pictures, software and everything on a raid 0 array using Seagate (NEVER AGAIN!)
Now I switched to WD and couldn't be happier!
Click to expand...

LoL, swapped to Seagate from WD myself - good stuff.
(Forgive my double post)
 
lossless iTunes library on a Drobo, backed up to another Drobo, backed up online, and also on multiple random drives.
 
its good to know the stages to help get through such a difficult time

I once almost lost some data that was backed up in DOUBLE. Mirrored hard drives both went all screwy and data was gone (just first level though, I'm sure I coulda scanned em and gotten a few things back) and then when I was in the process of formatting the mirrored drives and re-backing them up from my 1TB backup drive, IT died, but like the next day, so it was very very close
 
The only thing I truly care about is my photos. Music, movies, TV shows, who cares. In fact, a few months back I lost 7TB of data. I really don't care that I lost it. It helped that I was in a transition point in my life and my photos are safe(Backups on a separate drive, backups in a separate state, most of them are on my picassaweb account). I don't spend a lot of time indoors these days, so the loss of movies, tv shows, and music is not a big deal for me.

Yeah, fileserver in my sig, still haven't bothered rebuilding it.
 
I was a bit of a digital hoarder downloading and saving every movies, tv show, music video or song I could get my hands on. I had about 5TB full on my 8TB file server in RAID5 when two drives dropped out and it was all gone! I was in disbelief that all of my hoarding was gone. However, it made me realized I didn't need any of it because I rarely used anything I gathered. I guess it kinda helped me for the better because I was just about to start ripping ISOs of my DVD collection.
 
Should be rephrased...

shlooky said:
Yes I went through all of that, lost all sorts of footage, data, pictures, software and everything on a raid 0 (NEVER AGAIN!) array using Seagate
Now I switched to WD and couldn't be happier!
Click to expand...
 
About 10 or so years ago I had about over 2000 mp3s which were a crapload for it's time. It was about 3 in the morning and I was dead tired. I was doing some webpage work on my computer and saved some scrap image on the same partition as my mp3. When I finished, I went to that drive and highlighted the mp3 folder, and habitually hit DEL, ENTER (the are-you-sure? prompt) and my mp3 folder went poof.

I blinked once. twice. three times.

I kept repeating myself - shit shit shit shitshitshitfuck shit shit shit!! But it was too late, everything was gone. Back in those days recovery software were not free (Norton Unerase) nor widely known nor readily available.

If there was a better way to wake up than drinking coffee, this is it. Needless to say, I've never disabled the recycle bin ever again. :-P
 
The MTBF and reliability of HDDs is coming under scrutiny after their marketing folks spread FUD about SSDs. At least SSDs have a usage register (and have no moving parts) that you can look up and estimate when you need to buy your next SSD, HDDs are a crap shoot and when Smart tells you there is a problem it is often too late. At the prices they are being sold at and today's densities I would be surprised if they are being tested as well as a few years ago. Everyone wants cheap, cheap, cheap. The HDD guys get away with it because when the drive fails after the now shortened 3 year warranty it has been so long since you purchased the drive that you can get passed the psychological barrier of it being so long since you purchased it. What last 3 years in a computer now a days? This will get worse going forward. I just lost a 500GB. Horror, pain, depression. I now have several 1.5TB drives that I have to look forward to worrying about. Buy a brand name doesn't help. Either back-up regularly or do raid mirroring for peace of mind. It would help to find a way to hold HDD guys accountable for their crap.
 
Back when I was in college I had a computer lab teacher that preached everyday to back up data. He always said that data loss was not an acceptable excuse for not turning in an assignment. This is back in the day when we still used 3.5 floppys. I was currently building a new system. I had a completed project that took me about a week to complete. I had it saved on my floppy that I was supposed to turn in that afternoon. I also had the project saved on my main system as well as my new rig that I was building (had it put together and the OS installed but had not recieved my new power supply so I had used the one out of my main rig to make a test run). I also had it saved in my online Blackboard accout through the school. I went to double check a correction on my floppy disk and while rewriting the file to the disk, my power supply died. Ran to my roomates system and stuck my disc in & the file was corrupt. No problem I will just snag it off of Blackboard and make a quick coppy, Blackboard was down for maintenance until the following Monday. I walked to campus and went to my proffessor and told him the story. He acutally believed me and said if you can fix your hardware problem by this time tomorrow, I will accept your project with no penalty. Needless to say I found a powersupply that day.
 
Azhar said:
...
When I finished, I went to that drive and highlighted the mp3 folder, and habitually hit DEL, ENTER (the are-you-sure? prompt) and my mp3 folder went poof.
...
Click to expand...

Thank God for unerase programs, for sure. My current habit (that I'm trying to break) is to shift-delete things. A couple of times I've had to go recover stuff that I really didn't want to delete.

And to think that MS (and, yes, Apple first) knew what they were doing when they made a purgatory for deleted files. :p
 
Uhg. Been there way too many times with WD drives. Therefore I only buy Maxtor, or Seagate.
 
I once lost an entire semester worth of grades for my students.... mid semester!!!

UGH!

Luckily for me a couple weeks earlier I did a printout to post grades on my door, with student ID numbers, and I tricked them into some "extra credit" by having them do test corrections and resubmit them (with the test of course :D) but reentering that crap was a pain. Now every week I email myself my grade sheets just to have an up to date version somewhere on some email server as well as on my home computer.
 
shlooky said:
Yes I went through all of that, lost all sorts of footage, data, pictures, software and everything on a raid 0 array using Seagate (NEVER AGAIN!)
Now I switched to WD and couldn't be happier!
Click to expand...

Every brand's drives die. Every single one.

There is one rule of data preservation -> Your data is only as good as your last backup.

When was it? Where is it? Do you have a backup for your backup?
 
Decibel said:
Every brand's drives die. Every single one.

There is one rule of data preservation -> Your data is only as good as your last backup.

When was it? Where is it? Do you have a backup for your backup?
Click to expand...

This is true but i have had better luck with WD myself. I went through a lot of problems with maxtor drives back in the early 00s, went through a couple bad seagates shortly after that, replaced those with a hitachi deskstar that i ended up RMAing 3 times before getting rid of it.

During all of that i have a few WD drives that are still going strong. Out of all those bad drives though only the maxtors ended in actual data loss. :mad:
 
EDIT: I meant to mention that i realize that its very random and based on luck and everyones experience is totally different.

But i will still buy WD over the rest when possible because luck or not its worked well so far.:p
 
Steve said:
I don't think there is a single person reading this that hasn’t went through THIS at some point. Personally, after losing a hard drive to the click of death, I now have a 1TB back up drive for my 1TB back up drive. :D
Click to expand...

I've never really gotten beyond stage 3. Maybe I had one foot into step 4, but then someone pointed me towards hirams CD (no longer available, AFAIK, since half the software is commercial...the rest is abandon ware) and it succeeded where other generally awesome commercial products failed.

Now I try to back up a bit more often...and once my new 1.5 TB drive comes in, I'll increase duplication on my WHS.
 
Decibel said:
Every brand's drives die. Every single one.

There is one rule of data preservation -> Your data is only as good as your last backup.

When was it? Where is it? Do you have a backup for your backup?
Click to expand...

+++++

I've lost Maxtor Drives (one was the warranty replacement for the original) and one WD.....I may have lost a Micropolis years ago, but I don't think so.

I love WD drives. They're quiet and I think they're generally reliable, but I'm under no illusions that I won't have a drive die again.

Backups are the only way to protect yourself.
 
A few years ago I went through each of these phases, but after that I learned my lesson and now only experince 2 of the 5 steps. :p

Seriously, as of today my workstation has a RAID 5 for just my documents, music, movies, photos, and work related materials; I have an external 1.5 TB drive for real-time file syncing of the RAID'd drives; a seperate back-up server with incremental backups; an online file storage service; and I burn disc's every 6 months to a year for off-site backups.

Overkill? Maybe. But, I don't get anxious about my data anymore. :p
 
Marlfox said:
Running Seagate 2x1tb Raid 1 array atm. Not quite too paranoid to make offsite/out-of-case backups yet.
Click to expand...

You must remember that RAID is not a backup. It is simply hardware redundancy. RAID 1 will not protect you from: accidental deletion or data corruption. If you are on Windows be sure to enable VSS for your data volumes.

This is why I love the Mac OS platform: Time Machine just works and is simple for all users.
 
Haha great article. Happened to me about a year ago and I went through pretty much every one of those steps :D
 
Steve said:
I don't think there is a single person reading this that hasn’t went through THIS at some point. Personally, after losing a hard drive to the click of death, I now have a 1TB back up drive for my 1TB back up drive. :D
Click to expand...

Same.. I have 2 1tb drives that are mirrored by robocopy manually.. i dont trust raid controllers :), then i have a 1tb external on site, and a 1tb external off site, also mirrored by robocopy.. i'm pretty happy with this level of redundancy..
 
Riftsaw said:
I don't show up in photos so I'm good on the pictures part.

I did lose some good brainstorm text documents when I was in like middle or high school though. A lot of those ideas never came back. :(

Since then I've kept a text archive that I moved around between HDDs as I went from major upgrade to upgrade.
Click to expand...

Same here, i've got a directory with ideas i'm always adding to that i move from PC to PC. I don't think i've ever backed up that one.

Maybe i should just find an online journal or something.
 
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