Friendly reminder to backup!
So yesterday, I noticed my backup of my files (I use a synchronization) to Backup EHD didn’t work. I didn’t have time to look into yesterday. Today, the backup fails again. Two failed backups in a row is not a good sign. During the backup today, I started getting I/O errors. I can browse my Backup EHD but it still looks okay. So far so good. So I use Western Digital diagnostic to do a quick check. It has a big red failure on it. Hmm, that’s not good. I tried to run Western Digital’s repair tool and it hung. Uh oh. Ran ChkDsk and it reported bad sectors (bad spots on the disk) and tried to fix them and hung. Definitely looking bad. In the meantime, I start shopping to see the latest deals. I am now in the process of reformatting the EHD and hoping to salvage the drive itself (during a reformat it can detect the errors and stop using them) that’s assuming that more bad sectors aren’t created. We’ll see. I am not very optimistic.
Did I lose anything? Nope. The EHD that is failing is my Backup EHD. Which means it only contains the copies of everything from the my main EHD and my laptop. What it does mean is right now I am not currently backed up. Now that scares me! If the format fails, I will be being a new EHD tomorrow.
Because of this, I do want to share a few things.
Pay attention to your computer errors. I noticed one failure and then a few I/O errors. If this was a hard drive that had important things on it, I would be busy copying files off of it. In this case, I actually could browse the drive and could have gotten all my files off if I wished. I am guessing that complete utter failure wouldn’t have happened for a few days. (By formatting I am pushing it to work or fail.) Of the hard drives that have failed in our household, most have been a slow death (start getting more and more errors) and I was able to get files off that I wasn’t sure were backed up. Only one drive failure was a spectacular crash of it just not working that day or ever. So pay attention to those errors and you might just have a chance to salvage something.
Backup, Backup, Backup! If this was my main EHD drive or my laptop drive, I wouldn’t be quite as calm but at least I know I would have backups and it would just take some time to resort things out.
Shopping
Oh and I just had to share, check out these colors from Western Digital:
They must know that there are digital scrappers that love EHD’s.
All my EHD’s have been Western Digital with 2 of them failing now. So I think I am going to branch out and try a different brand. I saw a 500 GB Seagate EHD for sale for $99 at Office Max and I have in store coupon for $15. That’s a nice deal!
I haven’t checked out the rest of the sales, so I gotta go do that.
As for how that formatting is going?? Well, let’s just say, it sure looks like I am going shopping tomorrow for a new Backup EHD.


