Sadly, due to shortages of element X, the price of Dataregaine and shaving cream has skyrocketed!

Seriously though, if you run HDDScan and get delayed reads and/or S.M.A.R.T. says it's replaced a few sectors... You deserve what you get for that being your only copy and using it for the next year! (Amazingly, you'll get repeat offenders... hahaha)

BTW: It's amazing how cheap recovery is when you make offsite backups.

Agreed on that.. And might I add stress-free too?

During a recent backup op I had my destination disk fail after it finished accepting all the info. Unbeknownst to me it would have to have failed sometime in the idle period after the backup completed. I don't believe it overheated or had power-surge issues. The drive wasn't overly warm or hot or anything. And it ran for about 1 hour or so, maybe 2. And I had verified that the backup was good also.

Moving along I had proceeded to intentionally wipe and format the source disk. I knew exactly what I was doing, I was erasing mega-important information dating all the way back from the 1970's! Erasing it off a series of drives I was preparing for hand-me-downs; making way for upgrades. Just cleaning and re-building the system to be bigger and badder. I had everything all ready to go.. Backup at hand - I have the fresh copy right here! Right off the press! Right here! Ready to restore from.

So I go to put the new drives in the system and get it all formatted and spiffed up nice, drivers loaded, raid-A-running, all that crap. And then I go to restore from last night's fresh copy. And the frakking drive holding the backup image is dead. Completely and positively, no question.

Do you know many different flavors of suck this had the potential to be?

No worries. I called it a night and settled in with tea and crumpets. The next day I went off-site and retrieved the other backup from a few days ago. And all was well once again. IF that had failed too, there were dvd's and cd's that could be assembled to restore the library I'm sure of.

Much of this data is archival data that doesn't have large volumes of changes. Changes that do happen are small and notational and could be easily recreated without a lot of effort. But to do the whole thing?? Forget it. It wouldn't happen.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Yeah tried that on my wee bald head and still can't remember what the hell I did last week...

S

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It's always somethin, and if it ain't somethin, it's somethin else - Cptn. Paul Watson.