Beware of backing up important data on mechanical drives!!

passion4tech said:
Ok so this is going no where. I'll make one last point. Traditional Hard Drives can brake or fail much easier than SSD. I believe that to be a fact. I'm done.
Click to expand...

Of course they brake much more easily, especially when you shut down the power, since the SSD isn't spinning in the first place.

Also, SSD drives do fail statistically about at the same rate as mechanical hard disks. You are in confusion about an anecdote being an instance of wisdom.
 
I hate to say it, but I don't like that setup at all. I wouldn't put a tower computer or all those cords so close to the feet. Also the setup just seems weird with the monitor to the left of the keyboard -- why?. The best desk is a traditional one, preferrably one of those 1950s rock-solid solid steel ones that can literally support a V-8 engine. I don't want hard drives to even wiggle slightly when they're running, and any desk with skinny legs, like a "modern" office desk, folding table, or dining table, is too shaky for me. On the other hand, a couple of small wooden filing cabinets or book cases with a slab of thick wood bolted to them makes a good computer desk.

SSDs scare me because so many of them come from small companies that didn't thoroughly test and design the controllers and firmware that handle the flash RAM chips. I'd stick with Intel or Samsung for SSDs.
 
All important data should have at very least one backup copy. If you lose the backup copy you still have the live data, back it up asap to new media. Idealy you should have more than one backup copy though. Good to have a cold backup strategy too. If all your backups are on spinning disks and you get hit with a major hack, virus etc... it could all be gone.

Personally I rotate through some mechanical drives for cold backups, then have some sync backups that are on a separate raid array, and also some that sync to my online server. If I lose any of those backup sources, it's not really a big deal, I will simply replace whatever failed and re-run the script or wait for the cron job to run.

I do need to add more drives to my rotation scheme though. I had a bunch of 1TB ones but it got challenging trying to structure the jobs across the drives so there is enough space, so I moved to having 2 3TB drives. I need to get a couple more of those just to add to the rotation. I keep one at home and one at work. I occasionaly swap them. The only time I would ever need those backups is if my backups on spinning disks fail me.

You can never have too much backups though. With all the cheap cloud storage available these days it does not hurt to occasionally encrypt a big chunk of data and put it on the cloud too.
 
And something that no one else has mentioned... SSDs can lose data just by being un-powered for too long. It's on the order of months for consumer drives, DAYS for enterprise. HDDs can typically manage a couple years before they lose a few bits here and there.
 
DTN107 said:
You guys scared him away.

Anyhow check out below.

http://ccm.net/forum/affich-907278-corrupt-hard-drive-chk-files#p939826

passion4tech if you ever visit us again. Try using GetDataBack program. It seriously saved my ass so many times.

On yea on the sidenote, why were you banned from sevenforum OP?

Don't be alarm OP. I already know a lot about you already =)
Click to expand...
DTN107 said:
You guys scared him away.
Click to expand...

You may want to file a missing person report; OP is missing for more than 24 hours. Just saying. :D
 
alaricljs said:
And something that no one else has mentioned... SSDs can lose data just by being un-powered for too long. It's on the order of months for consumer drives, DAYS for enterprise. HDDs can typically manage a couple years before they lose a few bits here and there.
Click to expand...

Not quite true: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

Depends largely on temp the drives are stored at, and how "worn" they are. Most ratings are based on drives that have exceeded their wear ratings, so "newer" drives just used for backups will likely last for years before they suffer any losses under normal storage conditions.
 
Bandalo said:
Not quite true: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

Depends largely on temp the drives are stored at, and how "worn" they are. Most ratings are based on drives that have exceeded their wear ratings, so "newer" drives just used for backups will likely last for years before they suffer any losses under normal storage conditions.
Click to expand...

Oooh, shiny. Thing is if I was to relegate an SSD to backup duty, it'd probably be an old one I had already used and then upgraded to a faster model.
 
thesmokingman said:
That doesn't change the fact that it is crazy to use SSD for back up.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't use the term crazy, I think it really depends on how you're using the backup. If you pull it out every 3-6 months and update the backup, data loss won't be a problem. Plus they are more resistant to shock and such than any mechanical drive.

Now cost might be a legitimate concern. No matter how you slice it, a HDD is far cheaper than an SSD, and if it's just a backup drive where the speed doesn't matter, then it might be a waste of money to use SSDs. But what if you're only backing up 100-200GB of data? And using a SSD you pulled from an old system? No reason NOT to use an SSD over a HDD in that case IMO. Plus your backups will go a lot faster.
 
I've had 2 SSD failures, both resulted in completely dead drives, no chance of retrieving any data.
I've had and serviced a lot of hard drive failures over the years but nearly all of them I have been able to recover data.
I use drives that have partial failures for backups still. They form a free part of my multiple backups schema.
Not something you can generally advocate unless you know what you are doing because some failures will result in data loss, but very handy for me.

There is a lot to be said for the modes of failure when comparing hard drives and SSD reliability for backups.
If a hard disk backup has a problem you are more likely to be able to recover data from it.

I've not had a single data loss problem with any hard drive I have retired to backup service, faulty or otherwise.
The only time I completely retire a backup drive now is if I replace it with a larger one.
 
Bandalo said:
I wouldn't use the term crazy, I think it really depends on how you're using the backup. If you pull it out every 3-6 months and update the backup, data loss won't be a problem. Plus they are more resistant to shock and such than any mechanical drive.

Now cost might be a legitimate concern. No matter how you slice it, a HDD is far cheaper than an SSD, and if it's just a backup drive where the speed doesn't matter, then it might be a waste of money to use SSDs. But what if you're only backing up 100-200GB of data? And using a SSD you pulled from an old system? No reason NOT to use an SSD over a HDD in that case IMO. Plus your backups will go a lot faster.
Click to expand...

Why you still trying to rationalize SSD for backup? It's a terrible idea and not what SSD's were designed for in the first place. This whole point is lame, it's not about the back up. It's about not dropping stuff on your backup drive then blaming the drive for being damaged lol.
 
thesmokingman said:
Why you still trying to rationalize SSD for backup? It's a terrible idea and not what SSD's were designed for in the first place. This whole point is lame, it's not about the back up. It's about not dropping stuff on your backup drive then blaming the drive for being damaged lol.
Click to expand...

I agree we're way past the OP here. Regardless of your media, you should treat it properly and not leave it sitting around to be dropped or spilled on or damaged. I still think SSDs are fine for backup depending on your application. There's plenty of cases where SSDs would be just as good or better than HDDs, and there's lots of others where HDDs, or DVDs, or tape would be better. I just don't agree with the blanket statement that SSDs aren't suitable for backup.
 
moving your data from your PC to an External is not a backup. a backup is having 2 or more copies of your data.
 
Bandalo said:
I agree we're way past the OP here. Regardless of your media, you should treat it properly and not leave it sitting around to be dropped or spilled on or damaged. I still think SSDs are fine for backup depending on your application. There's plenty of cases where SSDs would be just as good or better than HDDs, and there's lots of others where HDDs, or DVDs, or tape would be better. I just don't agree with the blanket statement that SSDs aren't suitable for backup.
Click to expand...

It's not that it's not suitable, its that it's a waste of money. You can flip the words around however you see fit and actually use SSD's for back up in your own use, but I would not recommend that especially in this day and age where we're talking data storage in terabytes.
 
thesmokingman said:
It's not that it's not suitable, its that it's a waste of money. You can flip the words around however you see fit and actually use SSD's for back up in your own use, but I would not recommend that especially in this day and age where we're talking data storage in terabytes.
Click to expand...

Oh I totally agree, they're FAR more expensive per GB than just about any other type of media. I'm just saying that cost alone doesn't make them completely unsuitable, it just makes them more expensive.

Case in point, I had an old 256GB SSD I used for backing up my laptop for a couple years. I'd do monthly full-images of the laptop over to the SSD in a little external USB case. Worked excellently, and having it on an SSD vice a 2.5" HDD probably cut my backup times in half. Worked only because the main OS drive in that machine was a slightly newer 256GB SSD and it wasn't close to full. If I was going out to BUY a backup solution in that situation though, an SSD would certainly not be my first choice.
 
This brings up to an interesting thought, is there even any media out there that is good for long term reliable storage? It seems tapes might be the only way but those are super expensive and tend to be rather proprietary, so 10 years down the line can you even find a tape drive for them. Optical media might be a choice for smaller data sets I guess. But even those I think they are rated for 10 years.

I personally use spinning disks myself for archiving, but that's not really truly archiving, more just hoarding data. :p
 
Red Squirrel said:
It seems tapes might be the only way but those are super expensive and tend to be rather proprietary, so 10 years down the line can you even find a tape drive for them.
Click to expand...

Proprietary? LTO has been an open standard since its inception in the late 90s, the O stands for 'Open' for that reason. New drives are backward compatible with older tapes (not all the way back, 2 generations by spec). Written tapes are vendor neutral as well, no need to replace that HP drive with another HP drive.

Other than LTO I don't know what might still be on the market. DAT in 4mm and 8mm varieties were around back when I needed to know but they were so bad that getting LTO was cheaper than working around the issues with DAT - if you were writing a lot of data. DAT was slow and drive duty cycles were so bad that you might not be able to write a full tape without overstepping the expected usage time that day.

Tape is expensive tho, these days the biggest use for them is legal requirements. All the places I've worked with use VTLs accessing disks for real backups.
 
Oh I always figured they were very vendor specific and that a certain tape drive would only read a very specific line of tapes. But yeah they are super expensive. I occasionally look into them, then quickly am reminded why I don't use them. :p
 
I keep a 3-drive external rotation going.

1 External connected to my NAS to sync weekly with one I swap out at work
1 External at work that I take home weekly to sync with the NAS and bring the NAS drive back to the office
1 External in my safe deposit box that I cycle out every time I go to the bank to deposit checks or get cash (every few months).

This way if anything happens to my PC, I have a nightly rsync of my data on my NAS I can pull from.
If anything happens to the NAS, I either have a copy on my PC, or a copy on the external drive attached to the NAS.
If my house burns down, I have a copy at my office that is a week old, or one at my bank that is a few weeks old.

I've thought about incorporating amazon glacier, but I think that's a bit overkill at this point.
I'm probably just going to bring one of my NAS devices to a friends house and rsync data over there on a nightly basis (Fios to Fios).
 
passion4tech said:
You just don't get my point do you? Of course not. If I had an ssd instead of HDD in that moment, I would have never lost my data. SSD have less chance of failing than HDD.
Click to expand...

Actually SSDs are known to lose data if they're sitting unused for a long period. So not a perfect backup media also on that sense.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Oh I always figured they were very vendor specific and that a certain tape drive would only read a very specific line of tapes. But yeah they are super expensive. I occasionally look into them, then quickly am reminded why I don't use them. :p
Click to expand...

I still use RAID 10 on my old Areca 1210 second array, but it does eat up a lot of HDD space on the 4 drives.

But I'm not running a server either.

Maybe see you elsewhere after the new year after the last time I told Allisolm to screw off. She has been headhunting me for years, on any slightest infraction.

Ni
 
Yawn...

The big primary reason why I built a FreeNAS box was to have a network-based storage device so that I can do automatic backups from my home computers, whether it be my main computer, my media computer, my mother's laptop, my own laptop, and the two USB stciks I carry around me on my keychain (one for personal stuff, one is a copy of software that may come in handy). It's on a RAIDZ2 configuration, so two of the eight 5TB drives can fail without losing data.

Plex server? OK. Torrent server? Cool. Centralized server for my collection of Steam cames, manuals, ISOs, and other old files? You bet.

And, I have that FreeNAS box backed up to several external 2TB or 4TB external drives. Murphy's law, you know.
 
MongGrel said:
I still use RAID 10 on my old Areca 1210 second array, but it does eat up a lot of HDD space on the 4 drives.

But I'm not running a server either.

Maybe see you elsewhere after the new year after the last time I told Allisolm to screw off. She has been headhunting me for years, on any slightest infraction.

Ni
Click to expand...

Yeah any new array I make is raid 10 now. I feel drives are so big I can justify it.

And yeah it's funny how they seem to randomly target people over there and infract over the wierdest stuff. Allisolm can [insert bad words here]. :p
 
I thought SSDs fail at less than 1% annually (well except for the problems that OCZ had that bankrupt the company).
And hard drives fail at >2% per year for their 5 year lifespan. So if these numbers are correct SSDs are clearly less likely to fail..
 
drescherjm said:
I thought SSDs fail at less than 1% annually (well except for the problems that OCZ had that bankrupt the company).
And hard drives fail at >2% per year for their 5 year lifespan. So if these numbers are correct SSDs are clearly less likely to fail..
Click to expand...
The issue has to do with how they fail. I'll accept taht SSDs fail less often than HDDs - but when they fail they fail catastrophically (100% unrecoverable most of the time). HDDs "fail" when they are no longer deemed usable or trustworthy - but in most cases when they reach that point most, if not all, of the data on the drive can be recovered. Really catastrophic failure of an HDD is somewhat rare, when it is the normal failure mode for most SSDs.

HDDs also tend to give warning of impending failure. SSDs generally do not.
 
Hard drives are an awful backup medium. When they are online they are prone to mechanical error, and if you hold them offline for long periods of time the magnetic field that stores the bits starts to deteriorate. Same applies to tape drives, which on top of that have their share of problems (remember VHS tapes?) and LTO drives are ridiculously expensive. In the case of SSD's, while there's no moving components, it still has the same problems as any online backup, and offline the electric charge deteriorates even quicker than the HDD's magnetic counterpart. Online backup solutions are expensive, and you are basically trusting your data to a third party... that is still most likely to use one of the above methods to store the data.

Honestly I've found the best backup solution to be optical media. Get a batch of good discs and they're rated to last hundreds of years when stored in proper temperatures and humidity (or thousands of years for M-DISC and HTL BD-R's). They also have built-in error correction which not only saves your data if you accidentally scratch/mishandle the disc but also gives you the opportunity to scan the drive for disc deterioration with compatible drives.

Here's a non-comprehensive list of CD/DVD burners that support disc quality scanning (with software such as Nero CD/DVDspeed), sorted by media type:

DVD±R(W): all Lite-On, Samsung/Toshiba, NEC/Sony Optiarc, Pioneer, Plextor, BenQ/Philips DVD±RW burners.
CD-R(W): all Sony Optiarc, BenQ/Philips DVD±RW drives, older Lite-On CD-RW drives.
Blu-Ray: Most burners except LG support scanning.

You should research Nero CD/DVDspeed and disc quality scanning if you want to learn more. The basic rule is that a quality DVD±R is gonna have less than 280 average PIE's, less than 4 maximum PIF's (PIE failures) and 0 POF's (uncorrectable errors). As for CD-R, while there is no standard, the basic rule is you need to have at least <10 average C1 (BLER = Block Error Rate) errors, and <2 indicates a very good disc and 0 E32's (at C2 stage, uncorrectable errors).

I'll leave this here for now, if anyone needs more information on recordable CD/DVD quality scanning / media and drive recommendations or further info on why I consider optical the most reliable backup solution, I'll be happy to answer questions!
 
Honestly I've found the best backup solution to be optical media.
Click to expand...

Does not scale well at all when you have 10s to 100s of TB of data. Although most home users will certainly not have that issue.
 
viper_0307 said:
Waiting for OP to come back because he kicked his soda or coffee into his tower PC sitting on the floor. Another accident waiting to happen.
Click to expand...
Nothing wrong with tower PC sitting on the floor (as long as it is not in the middle of the room), I do that for all my home PC's, it is even safer than keeping on unstable desk, that is constantly vibrating from your moves and that you can accidentally push and break down.
 
aztekk said:
Hard drives are an awful backup medium. When they are online they are prone to mechanical error, and if you hold them offline for long periods of time the magnetic field that stores the bits starts to deteriorate. Same applies to tape drives, which on top of that have their share of problems (remember VHS tapes?) and LTO drives are ridiculously expensive. In the case of SSD's, while there's no moving components, it still has the same problems as any online backup, and offline the electric charge deteriorates even quicker than the HDD's magnetic counterpart. Online backup solutions are expensive, and you are basically trusting your data to a third party... that is still most likely to use one of the above methods to store the data.

Honestly I've found the best backup solution to be optical media. Get a batch of good discs and they're rated to last hundreds of years when stored in proper temperatures and humidity (or thousands of years for M-DISC and HTL BD-R's). They also have built-in error correction which not only saves your data if you accidentally scratch/mishandle the disc but also gives you the opportunity to scan the drive for disc deterioration with compatible drives.

Here's a non-comprehensive list of CD/DVD burners that support disc quality scanning (with software such as Nero CD/DVDspeed), sorted by media type:

DVD±R(W): all Lite-On, Samsung/Toshiba, NEC/Sony Optiarc, Pioneer, Plextor, BenQ/Philips DVD±RW burners.
CD-R(W): all Sony Optiarc, BenQ/Philips DVD±RW drives, older Lite-On CD-RW drives.
Blu-Ray: Most burners except LG support scanning.

You should research Nero CD/DVDspeed and disc quality scanning if you want to learn more. The basic rule is that a quality DVD±R is gonna have less than 280 average PIE's, less than 4 maximum PIF's (PIE failures) and 0 POF's (uncorrectable errors). As for CD-R, while there is no standard, the basic rule is you need to have at least <10 average C1 (BLER = Block Error Rate) errors, and <2 indicates a very good disc and 0 E32's (at C2 stage, uncorrectable errors).

I'll leave this here for now, if anyone needs more information on recordable CD/DVD quality scanning / media and drive recommendations or further info on why I consider optical the most reliable backup solution, I'll be happy to answer questions!
Click to expand...


Ok I can see myself using blu rays to backup important data because they are more scratch resistant then dvd or cd. Who uses cds or dvds in this day and age? CD and DVD is so obsolete. Blu Rays are still relevant. So I can see myself using blu rays today not dvd or cd. What is this 2003
LOL.
 
akmens said:
Nothing wrong with tower PC sitting on the floor (as long as it is not in the middle of the room), I do that for all my home PC's, it is even safer than keeping on unstable desk, that is constantly vibrating from your moves and that you can accidentally push and break down.
Click to expand...

At work we have most of our desktop PCs stting on the floor. This is mainly for noise reasons however. Same goes for me at home.
 
I guess the lesson is dont store your HDDs under your keyboards.
Reminds me of a guy who placed a diamond ring into a Sundae which his girlfriend ate. Proposal didnt go as planned; lesson is dont place rings into food.
 
Gomar said:
I guess the lesson is dont store your HDDs under your keyboards.
Reminds me of a guy who placed a diamond ring into a Sundae which his girlfriend ate. Proposal didnt go as planned; lesson is dont place rings into food.
Click to expand...

So by OP logic. don't propose with diamonds rings... cause it definalty not his choice to put it into a sunday the was to blame... must be the ring
 
acquacow said:
Yeah, but if his girl can choke down a diamond ring w/o really noticing, he's probably made a wise decision...
Click to expand...

I guess the girl's finger was small, thus small ring, inside of an large ice cream can be swallowed easily.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top