The Death Of The External Hard Drive

oh noooooooooooo

that happened to me two weeks ago (my entire music collection on it). took it to friend-of-friend who said he could do cheap data recovery and it looked really hopeful and then the next day he called to say he couldn't do it, i'd need to take it to a professional. we found a few data recovery places and about the best deal appeared to be "starting at £97, not more than £250". given that they seem to charge on the basis of quantity and obv a music collection is massive, that's the point at which i decided it would be "liberating" to start again. it has indeed been partially liberating but it is also the closest i have come to weeping in a decade

yikes - that's definitely the nightmare, lex... i think i would weep too.

however, i have just discovered that it was my old, broken HD that i was using, and that my newer, still-functioning hd was in another moving box and appears to be doing okay. phew. should probably back that sucker up asap, though...

OK, so what's the most reliable way to automatically back up your music as you go along? My external hard drive was broken by an energy surge after a power cut and I recovered 100% of it but it was frighteningly expensive. Does anyone here use double drives?

I have my music library on my internal drive as well as backed up to an external drive. Plus the contents are on various removable devices as well. Depending on how big your library is you'd be well served using Google Music or Amazon's cloud service.

What if you're talking terabytes?

i have a dual-bay NAS set up as RAID 1 (translation = a networked external drive with TWO hard drives in it, which are exact copies, and which appear on your computer as one drive. if one drive fails, you already have an exact copy of it. howvwrr, if you get some kind of data corruption, that corruption is also copied...... so really i need to be backing those up to Time Machine or something)

ned, i'll send you an external drive, copy yer music on to it and i'll keep a back up here in the UK. kthx

ned for truly huge needs you can get, say, a three or five-bay NAS and set it up as one of the other flavors of RAID. the whole enchilada will appear as one humongous networked drive. and then of course for safety's sake you get the exact same setup again, and back everything up to that on a daily or weekly basis

Mine keep dying, it's a drag. Seems to be the essential ones that do it too.
Think I've just lost load s of VU & Sun Ra
not what the thread's about but, wah.

xpost -- sounds involved but worth it, of course. Pricing is obviously my key concern. (Keep in mind that I'm planning on a computer upgrade later in the year, so that has priority.)

This is intriguing.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/connected-data-transporter-sync/

Am trying to make my internal SSD as slim as possible. Current hurdle: iPhoto library.

ew