I recently lost about 700GB of data when one of my 1TB external hard drives failed. On top of that, my laptop bricked the very next day, refusing to boot from anything (including a live CD). All in all, I lost about 1TB of data in the space of 2 days (I only own about 2TB of data, total, so this was a substantial chunk of my stuff).
Tragic, right?
Not really. Out of that TB, 90% was replaceable media -- music, movies, TV shows. It'll probably take a month or so to get it all back, but I can get it back.
As for the important stuff, that remaining 10% of data wasn't completely lost. As I had upgraded over the years, I had always copied the files on my old drive to my new one and then kept the old drive. So I had maybe 2-3 copies of old code and photos sitting in my closet on old hard drives. Any newer photos were on my Facebook -- they weren't the original, hi-def versions, but relatives and friends wanting to see the photos really do not care about that. As for newer code, I had gotten a small external drive and was using it to keep all of my code in one place and it was still working fine. I could even get my music back easily, since I used Rockbox for my iPod's firmware and I could just copy-paste everything as-is without worrying about special iPod transferring programs. All in all, I lost almost nothing important.
tl;dr or the lesson I learned:
I am now way less attached to my TBs of media. After losing so much I realized that the only things worth saving could easily fit on a DVD. Sucks for people that have more than a few DVDs' worth, but as for me, I'm planning to keep a small partition on my main hard drive dedicated to important data and back up the entire thing to DVD every month. I'm fairly certain that months worth of DVDs AND a hard drive won't fail me at the same time (even with my current bad luck re: external + laptop) so that should be enough for me.
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I recently lost about 700GB of data when one of my 1TB external hard drives failed. On top of that, my laptop bricked the very next day, refusing to boot from anything (including a live CD). All in all, I lost about 1TB of data in the space of 2 days (I only own about 2TB of data, total, so this was a substantial chunk of my stuff).
Tragic, right?
Not really. Out of that TB, 90% was replaceable media -- music, movies, TV shows. It'll probably take a month or so to get it all back, but I can get it back.
As for the important stuff, that remaining 10% of data wasn't completely lost. As I had upgraded over the years, I had always copied the files on my old drive to my new one and then kept the old drive. So I had maybe 2-3 copies of old code and photos sitting in my closet on old hard drives. Any newer photos were on my Facebook -- they weren't the original, hi-def versions, but relatives and friends wanting to see the photos really do not care about that. As for newer code, I had gotten a small external drive and was using it to keep all of my code in one place and it was still working fine. I could even get my music back easily, since I used Rockbox for my iPod's firmware and I could just copy-paste everything as-is without worrying about special iPod transferring programs. All in all, I lost almost nothing important.
tl;dr or the lesson I learned:
I am now way less attached to my TBs of media. After losing so much I realized that the only things worth saving could easily fit on a DVD. Sucks for people that have more than a few DVDs' worth, but as for me, I'm planning to keep a small partition on my main hard drive dedicated to important data and back up the entire thing to DVD every month. I'm fairly certain that months worth of DVDs AND a hard drive won't fail me at the same time (even with my current bad luck re: external + laptop) so that should be enough for me.