[guru]

Continuing the 5th Anniversary Celebrations, PlanetAMD64.com has teamed up with nine other websites to giveaway 1.5TB of portable storage, courtesy of Seagate and Notebooks.com.

Backups are like paid days off: you can't have too many of them. The usual excuse is that you have no where to store it. Well enter now and you will have a chance at winning a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB portable drive and a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk drive.

All you have to do is post your backup sob story and how having a proper backup would have saved you time and grief. Post the replies here in this thread before 11:59PM on December 6, 2008 and the winner will be announced on Monday, December 8th, 2008. One story per person and we prefer works of non-fiction.

Want to beef up your chances? here are the nine other sites participating:

• CrunchGear
• Bleeping Computer
• Gotta Be Mobile
• Notebooks.com
• GeeksToGo
• Digital Home Thoughts
• Gadgetell
• Paulstamatiou.com
• Macenstein.com

Please post all stories in this thread.
Thanks

[Athildja]

A quick word on the Seagate Freeagents,
They work in 64 bit vista but not in XP x64 right now,
We are working with Seagate on getting this changed,
The drives still function as a regular external drive but you are not able to run the back, sync or power management on XP x64.
Other wise they are amazing drives :)

-Ath

[alister]

I don't have that big of a sob story. I had a hard drive dying on me and no backup. I was able to install a new drive and slave the old drive in my computer and was then able to recover some of my data. I ended up losing quite a bit of data (mostly mp3s). If I would have had something like this FreeAgent bundle then I would have been able to keep my data backed up.

[KillaGouge]

about 2 years into mine and my wife;s marriage we already had 2 kids. We had about 10gigs of pictures that i hadn't had a chance to back up yet. She got pregnant with our 3rd and ended up being hospitalized on bed rest, we had some friends come to take care of the house and the other 2. The guy decided to look up some "stuff" online and ended up getting us a nasty virus. Trying to be a nice guy, he reformatted and re-installed windows. So my wife and I lost the first 2 years of our kids lives and some family photos of my wife's that the originals got destroyed when her grandmother's house burnt down.

[DeWynter]

Not much of sob story but I just recently had to swap motherboards (evga 780i to asus p6t) and had to transfer all the info on a RAID 0 array to keep it. long story short I had to dump half the info to transfer to another Computer without enough space. Sure would have been nice to keep my sons pictures








PS. I dumped some episodes of BSG and stargate Atlantis to keep the pics

But I defiantly see the need for a backup drive and I'll still be buying a terabyte backup just for file transfers after the 6th .

KillaGouge is worse off than me.

This post has been edited by DeWynter: Dec 3 2008, 12:57 AM

[Christopholofigu...]

Not a sob story (ok, maybe it is), but we now use 3 of the 250gb FreeAgent Go drives (with the additional docks) to back up one of our servers. Nothing like having a RAID5 die on you and take down 2 of the 3 drives (do the math there, find the probability of losing these 2 drives over the weekend) and leaving your boss (the IT manager) SOL and sending the drives off to Denver to pull what data they save off the drives. Ok ok, sooo, great drives. They have a nice soft glow to them while working and the docks (sold separately) are very nice...yes yes, just a glorified usb cord but still sexy IMHO.

Ok, I feel better feeding the fires of the thread. I do not want to win one of the drives, so I am exempt.

Come on planeteers, I know there are some good ones out there (not saying that the previous post are not good, of course).

[CozaMcCoza]

I was told I could go to the moon, cure AIDS, cure cancer, rule the world and win the nobel prize for anything if I could back up something but I didn't have enough room on my hard drive...?

Ha, I wish!

I've lost my movies, pictures and music collection with a few rare recordings which I haven't been able to find again on about three occasions through hard drives dying. I must have gone through about 5 hard drives which I think is a bit high considering I've been doing this for about 5-6 years. I like to keep my things organized on their specific partitions but at the moment I have about every little nook and cranny filled. I don't even know where I might have put a few things to just trying to get it on my computer, here's to wishing I had a student loan once again and the credit crunch would go away!

Edit-> Hmmm that doesn't seem very sob story does it? How about adding:

Just before my 21st birthday I was diagnosed with cancer and therefore had to put my university on hold while I had treatment. Due to this it's pushed my length of stay at university along by a year and as it was originally a 3/4 year course (now 4/5 years) I no longer get a student loan so I'm fighting for survival with cash, food and university work! Please let me win, oh please! Does that add sob to my situation?

This post has been edited by CozaMcCoza: Dec 3 2008, 07:46 AM

[JokerFMJ]

So there I am, playing World of Warcraft to relax from all of my real work and school work and what happens? The screen locks up and the game crashes... Well Damn. Oh well, i'll just restart it... I double click my icon only to receive and error basically telling me my game is not installed.

So I click on a different icon, nothing happens. What the heck? I do my usual Windows+E to open up explorer and it takes a minute or two but it finally opens. Ugh, stupid Windows is acting up and explorer is being dumb, I'll restart explorer... I go into Task Manager and kill explorer.exe, New Task > explorer.exe.... 5 minutes later, still waiting... I need to reboot. So I reboot.

Everything reboots fine and I fully expect to be able to start up WoW or iTunes to listen to my many gigs of music that i've ripped from my CD's or whatever else I feel like using because hey, it's my computer and I do what I want! Well that doesn't happen... I'm getting the same error, having the same issues... Now i'm unable to explore certain folders on that particular hard drive (my storage drive, by the way) so I'm fairly certain it's the hard drive.

Wait a minute, everything is working now! So I post here on the Planet asking for advice. I run Memtest and a host of other programs all to no avail (although Memtest did give me a few errors). At this point i'm not sure if it's a Windows error or a Hard Drive error, so I figure i'll boot into Linux and try from there.

Well, I can't get into Linux. Apparently it's having severe issues with whatever is wrong with my computer and isn't able to load. UGH! What the heck!

So I go back into Windows and a few days later i'm getting the same error and all the same issues. I'm back to trying to troubleshoot it when all of a sudden my D drive (storage hard drive) disappears from explorer. I check Disk Management in My Computer and it's not there either. So instantly I know that my hard drive is bad.

That's when it hits me. The last time I tried to backup all of my stuff my External Storage Drive didn't work... I never got around to seeing if it was the Hard Drive inside or the enclosure it was in. Oh my Gosh i'm SUCH an idiot!

So I figure i'll try the external hard drive in my system since I now know my problem is a bad hard drive... Well, I plug in the external and it works! Great... Now i've only lost countless hours and gigs of music as well as other random files and tidbit programs i've collected (thanks, Tweak, for giving me the names of them again!!)...

Reinstalling all of my programs which were stored on there, games, etc... Ugh, what a pain, what a waste of time... And worst of all I have no way of preventing this in the future because I don't have a backup hard drive now...

Go Figure!

[Qwik]

One of my first attemps at overclocking I had no idea that it would or could corrupt my hard drives, after it did everyone said Oh yeah we back up all that stuff on a external drive....... DOH!

[slugbug]

A while back I was using a RAID 0 array and one hard drive decided to suddenly bite the dust for no good reason. I lost over 100gb of irreplaceable data including some rare jazz music which I will probably never find again. If I had had an external hard drive I might still have my data today

[Kurt_Aust]

Well it would seem that we as a group (PlanetAMD64ers) are either lucky and/or have good backup systems.

There are only 8 sob stories competing so far (I don't have one, though I know many people who do), compare this to the competition over at Geeks-to-Go where they asked people what their backup plan was (even if they didn't have one), 385 replies as I'm typing this.

[WFO]

Well it would seem that we as a group (PlanetAMD64ers) are either lucky and/or have good backup systems.

There are only 8 sob stories competing so far (I don't have one, though I know many people who do), compare this to the competition over at Geeks-to-Go where they asked people what their backup plan was (even if they didn't have one), 385 replies as I'm typing this.

I learned the importance of backing up with my 2nd laptop over eight years ago. I don't even remember what I did but I rendered it unbootable and lost everything. At one point I had 3 external drives that I made backups to. 2 Maxtor's and one Seagate. I used Drive image early on then switched to Acronis TI7- 2009 and also use Storagecraft Shadow Protect. My reckless years of rendering my systems unbootable every 1-2 months seem to be behind me. Now I only have to re image once or twice a year. I did switch to internal raid 0 disks for increased speed backing up and restoring. I really do need to make the occasional backup on the externals again. Hopefully it won't take a disaster for me to change my habits.

Edit: One of the reasons I switched to internal HDs was I actually had 2 failed Maxtor One Touch IIs and lost about 500GBs of backups.

This post has been edited by WFO: Dec 4 2008, 08:30 AM

[McJugga]

Wow, you won't believe how big of a coincidence this is.

I am in grade 12 at the moment and just recently, I was working on a really big project at school. We have to make a fake newspaper with a group of three friends, around 5-10 articles each. After many days of gruesome work, I finished. I had a total of 8 articles (1-3 pages each article) and dozens of pictures drawn, photoshopped and found.
I call my friends and we decide to meet at one of their homes.
So I put all of my work onto my very old, somewhat glitchy portable hard drive. Now, this wouldn't have been any risk whatsoever had I copied my documents onto it. However, when I selected all of the files to copy them, I must have slipped or missed and hit CTRL-X, rather than CTRL-C.

Little did I know, all of my hard work was on that hard drive and nowhere else. So I go to my friends house, plug in my HDD and guess what happened. Absolutely nothing.

Imagine my frustration, one day until the due date and over one weeks worth of pages upon pages of writing is gone. Well, at that moment I wasn't exactly frustrated, considering I thought that it was still on my PC.

This is getting sort of long so I will finish up quickly.

I went home, looked for the documents and saw nothing.
It is getting really late so I figure I will just tell my teacher what happened.
Anyways, he says something like, "Yeah, like I am going to believe that." It is understandable, I wouldn't believe it either.
So I failed, my friends' marks, however were not affected.

Well I learned 3 lessons from this.
Do not wait until the last minute for something that requires that much work.
Make more backups!
Remove the 'x' button from my keyboard so this can't happen again.

Oh yeah, I also had hundreds of pictures and home videos were on there, but almost 80% of them were on my PC.


I hope you enjoyed hearing about my loss.

This post has been edited by McJugga: Dec 4 2008, 05:05 PM

[Jedibugs]

Most recently, I had around 12 hours of footage from an all-day jazz event that I was doing a promotional video for. I didn't have a drive large enough to back it all up and my hard drive massively failed. Since I was filming on MiniDV, I had to manually re-log and capture all the footage (about a 24 hour ordeal). I also lost some writing at the same time. It sucked. Especially since it was a non-paying job.

[MaRSFlip]

I have lost some data in the past, mostly due to carelessly formatting the hard drive without backing up all my data. But up until now I’ve been able to recover the important bits most of the time. My most important loss however were some microscopy pictures (I'm a researcher in Developmental Biology) that I had archived in a DVD+R which just went bad - a lesson learned the hard way, I spent three weeks repeating the experiments and taking new pictures. Now I still archive older data on DVDs but always keep copies on a hard drive, which I find to be much more reliable. I'm also thinking of starting to make online backups of the most important documents, though I've been too busy to check out which are the best options available.

[guru]

This is for member saudz who is having ISP issues connecting to the board.

" A few years ago, I had an old hard drive that stored photos and documents. Most of this data was from many years safely secured. One day there was an issue with the power in the house. For some reason this fried the adapter and my hard drive wasn't working. I tried multiple ways to make it work including using it as a slave in an external case and an in another computer, but nothing worked. I couldn’t recover anything. There were some errors in the cluster and other issues. I tried using software such as "Recover my files" but I couldn't get anything. I kinda realized I had lost all that data and it was maybe due to the bad brand of the hard drive. I guess it wasn't reliable to buy some cheap brand to backup important data.

Although I have had bad luck with hard drives, there have been many times where it has saved me from the worst. I used to backup all my laptop data on my external hard drive. One day the laptop had caught a virus of some sort and I couldn't open my files. This included my thesis paper and other really important documents that I had invested so much time into. I was so worried I had lost it all. Luckily, I had remembered that I had a backup of all my laptop data on the other hard drive. I formatted my laptop drive and then used my backup data back into. Thankfully all went well for me after that."

[MaddMoose]

awww...I can't enter as I haven't had any data loss catastrophes

[TNShadyLady]

I'm a writer and I have years' worth of manuscripts in progress as well as research materials from sources no longer available. My "backup" plan is simply to email critical files to myself via a web email account, where I leave them in "storage". This is clumsy but works fine until the web email provider suddenly and unexpectedly closes its doors! But it's the only plan I have until I can devise a way to do local off the computer backups. Winning this would solve my problem. I really really REALLY need it!!

ps thanks for fixing my account so I could post

[vranab]

I once lost my entire work e-mail database, due to a mistake by the system admins. What a pain. The system backup was woefully out of date. So I now back up to an external hard drive myself.

[cdubs136]

I forget all the exact details of how my tragedy played out. Basically, I had a 500GB drive that was filling up and I bought another 500GB for backup of important files and more space. I had to remove my original drive from the HD cage to mount them both how I wanted them. The computer was on, HD spinning @ 7200 RPM sitting precariously in my case. It fell about 8 inches and made a God-awful screeching noise. 12 hours later of chkdsk, diskrepair, and diskrecovery tools ... I had 1 working HD (the new one) and about 1/3 of my original data that was uncorrupted. I still don't have a backup

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