YIPES Bad morning HD failure in workstation !

[Tony Prior]

well the worst that could happen, DID..right in the middle of final tracks on a new project. DISK error.
the 3.5 HD I was using has a PHYSICAL error, the worst kind. It doesn't spin anymore. good grief.

Yeh I know, I can send it out and recover the data, which I probably will do but the truth is I can probably re-record everything I need in a the course of a day or so, the one bad thing is we had a GREAT vocal track from my wife on one of of the tunes.

So the moral to the story is...

Drum Roll Please....

BACKUP often...

Don't take it for granted that the next time you power up it will actually POWER UP.

I guess I may contemplate after all upgrading the Yamaha AW2816, which I really love to a new unit which has the USB interface for VERY easy and fast back up.

tp

[Wiz Feinberg]

I recommend Acronis True Image for backups, restoration of individual files and complete disk imaging. It is much less expensive than Ghost and geared toward home users, whereas Ghost is more of a corporate/OEM solution.

[Dave Potter]

Sorry to hear about the crash. Obviously I can't offer any magic bullet.

Wiz's advise re: Acronis is good; I use it too. The thing that makes it useful in case of a system crash is that it has the capability for establishing an "Acronis Secure Zone" on any of your existing HDs, in which you can store a backup of your entire drive, and which is accessible PRIOR TO BOOTUP, meaning, you can access and restore your drive when you are unable to get Windows to boot. That's huge.

I use the "Acronis Secure Zone" to backup my boot drive. For added backup, and I have multiple other internal and external HDs, I also keep incremental backup routines going every couple of days, for all HDs, on an external Firewire 800 1.5 Terabyte drive, in RAID0. In addition to the incremental backups, I also keep periodic "Duplicates" of each of my 4 other HDs.

I've been burned by disc crashes. They're not happy occasions, and nowdays, I've gone to multiple redundancy

[Ken Lang]

Based on the Wiz's recommendations, I bought Acronis. It works well, but the backup files can be huge. For 2 computers and one external drive it's 60 Gigabytes, and those are not full system backups either. Just make sure you have an external storage that's big.