On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

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

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.