On 12/28/2014 10:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer
crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.


If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you
computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and steals
your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig.
This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data
selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.