When Was The Last Time You Changed Your Hard Drive?

i figure in a year or two they will stop supporting windows 7 and when i buy a copy of 10, i'll get a new SSD for that drive and start over on that drive. so far the drives are holding up. but i make a back up of the vital stuff every day. there really is no way to know when it will quit. i did learn to dust out my computer (when its off, i learned the hard way on this one). and it runs much better without the dust. also make sure your graphic driver is up to date, because i got a few stop errors because of that.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

When my HD goes out I just buy another computer. I don't think I've ever had one last 5 years.

I always use a RAID level with redundancy. Hard drives are changed if needed with no lose of data.

Of course I also have multiple backups of all data.

I have a home backup system that backs up my files to two external hard drives within five minutes of saving them to my computer so I generally don't worry that much. It's still possible that a catastrophe could happen and I could lose a lot of files, but if my laptop fried right now it wouldn't be a big issue.

I currently don't backup online besides the files that I have uploaded here. I'm considering setting up a backup system to Dropbox or something like that.

I also still have RAW files across dozens of memory cards too.

Well, William, I would expect nothing less from you but that is a bit hard for the average person to set up without a technician. It CAN be done but it is harder. I back up to Carbonite and it constantly back up every save as they happen but I pay $120 or so every three years for it. I started the process a few hours ago and Carbonite is 34% done bringing back the folders and the actual files should start populating shortly...

Toby, I never do the flash drives... want some 8GB CF cards? I don't use them anymore... But your back up plan sounds safe enough.

This post is only to remind folks to think about the last time they backed up their art or their main drive... It could all go south in a second and the prevention while a pain is much less painful than having to rebuild from scratch.
Also losing 50,000 images is more pain than I can ever imagine (more like 70,000)...

what Mike said.

"This post is only to remind folks to think about the last time they backed up their art or their main drive."


I'll admit I'm not nearly as diligent as I should be, I'm overdue for doing a back up, which for me is just copying my Data folder over to an external hard drive. I like to keep it simple. I should get another external drive though to keep an offsite copy in case my home burns down or something.

Im having a busted drive hopefully fixed right now. Years of taxes. Oh it's encrypted too.

Tech asked when I last switched it out. I looked at him...

Switched it where when what now?

How old is it? I got it with XP. Running 7 Ultimate sooo 10?

He says 3Yrs is smart. 5 years is a big risk.

Oh.

Huh? I did not know that.

Most people don't like to think about it because it's a bit of work. I actually like starting over. You can just install those program you really want and windoze is lightning fast, at least for a while.

It's loading all those programs that you rely on...
But here's the thing. Most of mine are just a download away. Adobe Creative Cloud, download and LR and PS are back... configuring LR, thats another question. Topaz? Login and download. Boom and done.
I'm not even sure what CDs I need to go look for right now. Even chrome remembers all my passwords... as long as Google doesn't get hacked I'm ok...

Have a good night

1. Never save anything to a hard drive in a computer.
2. save all important data - documents, pictures, etc. - to an external usb drive
3. back up that external drive to another external usb drive and store offsite.

Easy, peazy. Good backup software is available for free.

In answer to your main subject question - a few weeks ago.

An external drive crashed altogether. I bought a new WD blue, an usb enclosure, put it together, restored from the last backup and I'm off and running with a new good drive.

A few bucks, a little time but minimal loss.

(P.S. I used to swear by the WD black caviar, but that is what failed. I now use WD blue because they run slower and cooler. Work well in an enclosure).

This computer is nearly two years old now, I guess I better plan on replacing it in a little over a year. Sometimes I wonder if technology really does make our lives easier let alone better...on the whole that is.

The average hard drive runs about 3-5 years.
Supposedly the WD black caviars last 5-7 years.
The one that failed for me was 9 years old.

Nonetheless, you should plan your computer / harddrive / hardware life span at about 3-5 years.

nine years so far
dust cleaning last summer
maybe should start thinking about new
mostly backed up

Speaking of which, does anybody know if it's better to keep hard drives off most of the time during the day, and then turn them on only as needed, or is better to let them run continuously throughout the day.

i think drives sleep automatically when not in use. if anything its better to save on power and heat. its also better to just have the drives you need and not simply fill in all the bays because you have the space.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

The KISS principle works for me, keep it simple stupid.

Back up everythig that is important, saved twice, in two different external hard drives.

Well I started this 2 days ago and as an update, Cabonte has been chugging away to replace all my files to the original locations.
It's 52% done so a 392GB back up takes a while to get back all of it. Makes me wonder about all my raw files that top at 1.3TB on my Art drive...

I think I need another method of backup added in

Personally I'm doing alot of Admin work with my art, whatever it takes.

Yes it is boring none creative monotony but very necessary.

So keep at it Jeff, to keep what you have to do to keep things safe and secure.

I'm sure you will have gained a lot of peace of mind when you have finished putting in the time and effort needed to be %100 organised.

I use BackBlaze, $95 for two years. I think there might be a downloading fee per MB to get your data restored by any of these. BB claims to have the lost restore costs.

My laptop hard drive went two weeks ago. I bought a 240 GB SSD. Amazing technology, incredibly fast.

I liked it enough to buy a 120 GB SSD for my desktop. The SSD is my OS and will be my PS on the C:, while on the D: is my data which is 280 GB of photos alone. The D: is 1 TB.

Love the SSD hard drives. Things really pop.

Dave

Years ago the argument went back and forth on whether it was better turn turn all the way off or not and as David said above the new systems put a hard drive to sleep so it should be ok to leave it on.
A full shut down does help the system by letting it zero out memory registers and things that help it think.
You will usually see a speed improvement after a full shutdown.

I've been out of the tech field for some years but these things haven't changed much.

I keep my photos on external hard drives, backed up using BackBlaze. Nothing is kept on my iMac's main hard drive that cannot be replaced. My external hard drives are copied onto other external hard drives for local redundancy, and then there's Backblaze for catastrophic instances. Simple and it works. So far, anyway.

I use a solid state boot drive for my drive C. Only install programs and Windows system on that drive. I use another drive for data, which is raided (set up by the vendor) incase one drive dies.

You can create a mirror image of the boot drive onto another (relatively inexpensive) portable drive. So, if the boot drive dies, get a new one and reload the system.

Also, I store a LOT of data on NAS drives. LOTS. All those drives are raided with a USB external backup for each one.

I don't do flash drives either, I just put my memory cards aside when they fill up. Another method of backup.

My main backup is a western digital dual hard drive array that backs near real time.

Most folks don't think about backups until AFTER a problem..and sadly, techs, are some of the worst offenders.

As far as flash drives, stick with name brands, and do NOT use them as the sole source for your data. Had a user buy a cheap brand from Costco, and MOVED, not copied their data from their laptop HD to the flash drive. Yeah well, about 2 weeks later, ALL of their data was gone. The flash drive had chip go bad, and was only able to see 4gb of a 32gb drive. Lesson learned, the hard way.

As Dan said, most conventional HD's will give you 3-5 years, SSD's, are based upon read/write cycles....so your mileage can vary greatly. Oh, and NEVER EVER defrag a SSD drive, you will greatly reduce its life span due to the massive amount of read/write cycles a defrag will use up.

I don't change out my hard drives due to age. I change hard drives when and if it starts making noises of dying. However, the hard drive in my computer never sees 5yrs, as I buy a new computer every couple of years. I buy new externals due to running out of space. So at this moment, not a single drive is near 5yrs old.

I've had hard drives last a long time. My old Mac has had the same disk since I bought it in 2011, and has been turned on 24 X 7. My Mac Pro laptop has a SSD, not sure whether that will match the longevity of the old HDD, but for both, it's a good idea to keep a current backup. In addition, since all the photos I care about are stored in the database in Apple Photos, I keep a couple copies of that single huge file that has all my pix on removable media too.

I guess I will wait for them to die on their own. When the old Mac goes, it will be time for a new one rather than a disk replacement, so I'm keeping good copies of everything.

Was just reading something about one of Samsung's new SSD drives and they were calculating it wouldn't wear out for 100 years. Although I think the usable space shrinks over time.

Just ordered another backup drive - 6T after this thread!

I had a drive die a few years ago. Lost a few months of photos that hadn't been backed up. I kept the drive around in case I ever really need something from it and it can be recovered or $$$.

My ultimate back up is the stuff here and on stock sites. That's the cream of the crop.

....

Like Toby - when I go on a trip like to Iceland, I just save the SD cards.

Should take an inventory and count them but I have over 1000 of my images printed.

Therefore if for some reason I lost all of my digital images, I still can retrieve a photograph from each of them, would take a lot of time but it is possible. Might have to change what they are called from digital art to digital art photos.

SSD's are still an evolving and new tech, so, as first generation users, we will be the test subjects. Maybe they will last a century, maybe not. It's still a good idea to keep backups.

I just changed out my system drive and main internal storage drive.
The two drives in my image bank and back up box are both under a year old.

@Alan, interesting plan but I don't think the quality would be as near as good as the original.
@Matthew I think you are good to go but what about a hard drive failure right this minute? Yes they are new but it could happen and rarely do they give you a clear warning that they are going to fail AND give you time to back them up...
@Toby and @Edward, interesting I'd on keeping all past trip on cards. How many cards do you have and how do you catalog them?

Yesterday.

What my repairman said was that the unit was over heating. As someone here mentioned the fans get clogged (I can't believe how quiet it is now.) Between the dog hair and the dusty environs. I can't blame it. Also, it's a 10 year old computer.


The hard drive was encrypted with True Crypt which is a company in the true crypt of companies, and with a fratzed hard drive urg! But he fixed it. It's an advantage of living in IBM country. There are some people here who have been involved in computers from the jump.

The new hard drive (300 Gig) cost $33. That's 11 cents per GIG! He considered going solid state, but the computer is 10 years old. (I still have window 7 Ultimate and a full suite of Office that works fine for my purposes, so why risk non compatibility? The Anti Virus too is grandfathered and professional grade robust, so, I'm not particularly interested in replacing it either. Backed up to an external in format and in RAW so I can put it "anywhere(?)"

Now I just have to figure out (again) how to load One Drive to this computer.

11 cents per gig... unbelievable. Brand new, with a 5 year warrantee (it apparently has been on a shelf for many of those years but the warrantee is from date of purchase, I suppose).

Jeff you are right about the quality, yet I don't consider myself to be a photographer, as most of my images are used as a basis or references for digital art, as have never sold a straight photo of mine thus far.
Photographing my printed digital art is in par with photographing a water color or oil painting I have made, something is lost in the process but only if a comparison is made, if not, no one except people like you Jeff would ever know or notice.

Well Alan, that does make a difference. It took 5 days to get my data back but I find that all my back ups for Lightroom didn't... back up this year... Soooooo I will have to rebuild it again what fun... but! all my hundreds of music files are there along with my documents and what not....

If those of you holding cameras are worried about your work being lost in a HD crash, another aspect of this is to keep a photo database. I'm often surprised to find people having individual images scattered all over their drives, which makes backup and recovery sketchy. I put every image I care about into Apple Photos, so I have one big file as a container for all of it. Aside from regular backups, I make regular file copies of that one big file. It gets caught by my routine backup but also I have a separate copy, that can be opened from any other computer. It's not difficult to do and, follows the principle that, if you have several different backups, they won't all die on the same day (barring a nuclear blast) and if need be, you can open them from any compatible computer (Mac in my case), even if your computer is squashed to bits. If you use some sort of file locker on the web, it would be a daunting upload, but it's at least possible.

Jeff - I only have a couple like that. For example Iceland. I figure it would be more expensive to head back to Iceland then to buy another 64 G SD card.

Copying stuff over to my new 6T WD My Book drive. I'll use this as my main drive and use the other 3T and 4T drives as backups.

You never know when a drive might fail. Could be after a month or after years. I don't think newness matters much if you get a faulty one.