[ale] Hard Drive Failures

[David Tomaschik]

So, I was going to let myself be sucked into Ron and dev null's debate on
the other thread, but decided better of it.  While I am no Steve Gibson fan
(in fact, I believe his products and advice are only slightly better than
snake oil) I'm going to steer clear of that and head for the central topic:
there are a *lot* of threads on this mailing list about drives failing; and
no, I'm not suggesting there's an epidemic of drive deaths, just that
people are approaching it the wrong way.

If you care (aside from replacement time and cost) about a single hard
drive (rotational or SSD) failing: you are doing it wrong.  Plain and
simple.

Backups are the solution to hard drive failures, not ddrescue, spinrite, or
snake oil.  Pick any one hard drive in my place and destroy it.  Other than
buying and installing a new hard drive, I won't lose much sleep over that.
 I might lose a little bit of data, but not enough that I'll be struggling
with ddrescue over it.

JD and I once did a presentation at ALE-NW about backup solutions.  There
are many out there: commercial and open source, local and remote, network
or disk-to-disk, etc.  Pick one (or be like me and pick several) and use
them.  Then enjoy the zen of treating hard drives as the commodities they
are, as opposed to the heart of your electronic world.

(FYI, this all comes from a couple of painful experiences before I
was enlightened to the path of the backup.)

-- 
David Tomaschik
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com
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