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When Will Your Hard Drive Fail?
jfruh writes: Tech writer Andy Patrizio suffered his most catastrophic hard drive failure in 25 years of computing recently, which prompted him to delve into the questions of which hard drives fail and when. One intriguing theory behind some failure rates involve a crisis in the industry that arose from the massive 2011 floods in Thailand, home to the global hard drive industry.
When you least expect it, except if you expect it to happen just before taking a backup. Then it'll happen just when you expect it to.
Short answer: If you actually care, you need better backups.
:)
If the HDD in one of my PCs dies, I don't care in the least. Restore it from last night's backup to the NAS, and call it good.
If up to two of the HDDs in my NAS die, I buy new ones, swap them in, resilver them, and call it good.
If my entire NAS dies, I would start to get worried, but at that point I can still fully recover (at least to where I left everything last night) from my partially offsite backup, an exact snapshot of my NAS that lives in my detached garage.
If my house and garage somehow both get destroyed at the same time, I would lose a lot, but do still have my most important data mirrored offsite... Though at that point, I probably have more important things to worry about than re-ripping my music library.
But if you care about when any one particular drive will fail on you, you've already accepted the eventual catastrophic failure and loss of your life's work as entirely acceptable.
Him having a backup on the same machine is almost as bad as not having one at all, IMO.
That was bad, but holy fuck, his backup "strategy" was manual drag-copy!!! It sounds like the "backup" drive was fine, but just didn't have all the data he needed to recover, because it was never copied there.
Why is this guy writing about computers???
Yeah, the whole article came off as "Look how stupid I am even though I am supposed be writing about IT."
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Probably because computers don't bite you in the ass merely because you write about them without knowing about them; while most other computer-related jobs have built-in punishments, exacted somewhat more capriciously but almost as inevitably as a hot surface burning your hand when you touch it, for not knowing what you are doing.
Puking up column-inches to wrap around the ads is pretty safe by comparison.
Stop reading! Back that drive up!
...But I had to remember to make manual backups via drag and drop. ...
With a backup strategy like the one he describes in place, it is amazing his data have survived this long.
.
His backup strategy is worse than non-existent. It gave him a false comfort.
A second drive in the same computer? Wow, just fuckin' wow.
I just made a note to never, ever read anything else Andy Patrizio writes. It is writers such as he who give tech writers in industry magazines a bad name.
geesh.
What is TIL
TIL is a fairly common, in recent years, initialism for "today I learned." The very first result I got for a Google search for "til" is the TIL Reddit. The very second result was an urban dictionary entry. I don't know why I bothered to do the work for you; I suppose I felt generous being your Google-bot.
The billionaires don't pay estate taxes. For one, it's not a tax on death, or the person who made the money being taxed twice. It's an income tax on the person receiving income (from an inheritance). And you tax based on the income value. You can gift someone about $15k per year without triggering income or estate tax thresholds. So you gift your little Paris $15k in hotel stock every year forever, and you'll pay out $1M tax-free. Also, when you die, you put it all in a trust structured to shield them from tax liability. The standard plot device of "rich, but not" where you have controlling interest in Stark or Wayne Enterprise or whatever, but no spending money. Like in the comics, this wealthy but poor only lasts a month, before they are back to normal. But those tricks are used in real life to avoid income taxes, especially for inheritance, and business holdings.
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