hard drive failure - advice needed!

[Edwin]

I use 5.25" floppies but I'm careful to rotate them every other week.

If you use a hole punch and line things up just right, you can make a second read/write notch and use the other size for free. (Ah, the nostalgia!)

 

[wonder_lander]

The beauty of my arrangement is that I haven't got any ongoing monthly costs and if I need to access my offsite stuff I can go and grab the external hard drive which would be quicker than trying to re-download 200GB+ of data!

 

[stellar73]

Seems an interesting discussion has developed since I've been away!

I used to use Mozy as well but was in a shared flat at the time with around 500g to back up and it was simply taking far too long to get the initial back up done. Then they put their prices up horrendously a couple of years ago and it was too expensive for me at the time.

Most of my precious data are photographs which thankfully were all backed up on external drives before the aforementioned laptop death.

Also just recently subscribed to Copy's free package (broad equivalent to Dropbox but with 10 x the free storage). If anyone is interested please sign up using the affiliate link I've just posted. I don't get money for this but they've got quite a crafty referral scheme where you earn an extra 5g of free storage for every person you refer. I've been merrily promoting it on Facebook to try and amass a decent amount of free storage. If you use this link it also means you get 20g free to start with as oppose to 15g if you go directly to the site.

Also just to go back to the OP re my hard drive death, have started to make a bit of progress. Managed to get chkdsk to run via safe mode command prompt (took hours) and it looks like Windows may be partially restored. It's giving me the normal login page now, the problem now being that my profile (which was the only administrator one) is corrupted so I cant log in. Still, there's a small glimmer of hope if I can figure a way around this and create an admin profile in safe mode which I've been told is possible

 

[AssetDomains]

A quick google brought up this any use

http://www.windows-commandline.com/2009/05/add-user-from-command-line.html

 

[monaghan]

I use 5.25" floppies but I'm careful to rotate them every other week

You newbie, I'm backing up my PDP11 to 8" disks

 

[monaghan]

Also just to go back to the OP re my hard drive death, have started to make a bit of progress. Managed to get chkdsk to run via safe mode command prompt (took hours) and it looks like Windows may be partially restored. It's giving me the normal login page now, the problem now being that my profile (which was the only administrator one) is corrupted so I cant log in. Still, there's a small glimmer of hope if I can figure a way around this and create an admin profile in safe mode which I've been told is possible

The newer versions of chkdsk are actually not too bad at getting disks back on-line, however, once you have got your data back, I'd swap the disk out for a new one.

 

[wonder_lander]

Your backup drive itself is a single point of failure whereas one hopes that Amazon spread your data across many disks and back it up as well. Most people probably wouldn't need *all* of their 200Gb data almost immediately.

You must have missed that I've got a windows home server as the primary backup, then a NAS in a hidden location in the house as a secondary backup and the offsite backup is the fallback (or will be when I implement it!).

 

[chrisduggan]

I have everything on a sepearate hard drive, recently started backing up to the cloud. I have a lot of family photographs and music I would not want to part with. Despite the slow upload and monthly fees, its peace of mind.