So you have the backup religion and you bought an external hard drive to backup all your data, all is well– right? Maybe, but what if the back up fails?
That is exactly what happened to the owner of a LaCie 500GB, 300721, USB/FW External Drive. After using the LaCie for over a year to backup important research data, the drive failed without any warning.
I tried to recover the data using Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but I could not even read the drive. As a last ditch effort, I disassembled the external drive and found no obvious clues to the crashed drive. See the image below of the drive disassembled.
The LaCie 500gb drive consist of two Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB ATA/133 HDDs.
I was able to read one of the drives using a
USB 2.0 to SATA + IDE (2.5 / 3.5 / 5.25″) Cable Adapter and recover all the data on that disk. All the data on the other disk was gone, or at least unrecoverable with the tools at my disposal.
I contacted LaCie and found that the one-year warranty had expired. I tried Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) and they said they do not warranty drives that are used in LaCie drives.
Once again, hard drives can fail without warning and valuable data can be lost. Make multiple copies/backups of your important data.
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May 10th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Wow, that is scary. In particular because I’m now looking at my Lacie backup hard drive which will soon be 1 years old. What should people do? Buy a new one every year? I’d really appreciate some advice.
May 10th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Hard drives, any brand or model, can fail at any time. The LaCie that crashed was being used in to back up data very frequently. The drive was also left on 24/7, generating a lot of heat which I think contributed to the short life span.
With that said, you have to determine how important your data is to you. If have data like downloads, programs, etc, you might consider the LaCie enough back up and accept some risk of having one back up.
If your data is very important to you, data such as photos, a thesis, projects, resumes, etc, then I suggest having a more comprehensive plan.
When I was in the Army, we used the keyword “PACE”. Which stands for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency. I apply this to some of my photos. I have my primary on my hard drive, alternate on the external drive, contingency on CD/DVD, and emergency in the form of printed photos. This may seem excessive to some, but not to me. Only you can decide the risk you want to take and how you want to control the risks. Good luck.
May 17th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
If you are making a true backup to an external drive, you should not lose any data if the drive fails, provided your PC does not fail before you replace the backup drive.
Unfortunately, too many people think “moving” data or storing data on an external drive is considered backing up. I always teach my customers not to do this. Everything should reside on the PC, and then be copied to the external drive.
July 6th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Known story. You must always remember that your HDD may be damaged at any time.
I think the best solution is to use additional backup storage, my opinion - using DVD disks. Today DVD’s is a cheapest solution. Use a single-record DVD’s to ensure your data will not be erased accidentally.