DriveSavers breathes life into a dead drive

Iria

It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful. Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing. Geek.com has an article walking through a drive recovery handled by DriveSavers. The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process.
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Source: Geek.com

Matth

The moral of that story (oh god, time I bought some) is that money invested into doubling up on your data is money well spent - $1500 for a recovery - sticking everything on two drives would have been cheaper.

The problem with most backup methods are the twin evils of time and media capacity though.

Anyone old enough to remember backing up using boxfulls of floppies, wave your zimmer frame... actually, I do remember doing one, actually a backup and transfer to new machine (no network) using PKZIP, and with a second machine formatting the floppies.

A 250MB tape, a later Ditto 3200, then DVD media. Even Blu-ray would need a lot of media swapping, and with write once 25GB media at about £8 (UK), the media costs more than another external disk drive - it is actually getting reasonable to consider extarnal drives as a backup medium - the only real drawback is that drives are somewhat fragile when compared to optical media - I wouldn't fancy relying on a box of external drives being transported often.

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Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread

BlueMak

My thoughts exactly.
BR discs are too expensive, and seeing how even DL DVDRs are relatively expensive even now, I doubt they will go down on price much.
As I see it now there is nothing that is both cheap and safe to use as a backup for hundrends of GB of data.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tipstaff

Good God. All of a sudden I feel really damn old.

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Matth

What's the cheapest external RAID box, or would it work out cheaper building your own server?

H'mm, If Nvidia RAID can be used with a Linux based server (don't wanna pay more Bill Gates tax), the a £32 motherboard (Inno3D SL7N73VM), an E1200 CPU, a bit of RAM and some SATA drives, could be the beginning of a nice little server. wonder if any Mini-ITX have RAID support - yes, the EPIA SN supports SATA RAID, now that could be a starter for a very nice micro-server.

__________________
Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread

Judas

alot of motherboards have a single raid 1 supported internal/exterenal esata system.

getting a internal 500gb sata and a external esata drive and then raid 1 them, and volla .. you've got a rather excellent solution

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BlueMak

Anyone knows what drives Iomega uses?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tipstaff

Last time I cracked open one of their boxes I was greeted by an Hitachi, however I don't know if that's still the case.

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BlueMak

I am very satisfied with Iomega products, an 80gb external drive I bought in 2001 still works (though I have loaned it to a friend now) but their warranty is still at 1 year.

Hitachi are not bad.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.