{"id":4927,"date":"2012-03-30T20:27:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T03:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/?p=4927"},"modified":"2014-04-02T13:08:05","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T20:08:05","slug":"i-love-you-please-make-offsite-backups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/30\/i-love-you-please-make-offsite-backups\/","title":{"rendered":"I Love You: Please Make Offsite Backups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every 6 months never fail<\/strong> a friend tells how sad they are that their hard drive crashed. When your hard drive crashes, what will you lose? Your kid’s pictures for the last ten years? Your taxes? That story you were writing? Your customer database? Your source code?<\/p>\n

What if your building burns down? Or if someone steals your computer? What will happen to your data?\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\nSeriously, it’s not a matter of if<\/em> your hard drive will die, it is a matter of when<\/em><\/strong>. They last only so long and then they die!<\/p>\n

For example, Google maintains about 100,000 hard drives. They treat them as nicely as possible. Google analysed their drive usage patterns<\/a> \u00a0(local archive<\/a>). \u00a0Every year, there is about a 1 in 14 chance that an individual hard drives will die.<\/strong> It doesn’t matter if it’s a brand new drive or well worn, 1 in 14 chance every year! It’s 50\/50 whether a drive has died after 7 years. Maybe you can get the data off it before it dies for good, maybe not. Do you feel lucky, punk?<\/p>\n

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Ask yourself: How do you know when a hard drive is about to fail and needs replacing? Answer: You don’t. It just fails! There’s a system called SMART that tried to predict failures but it doesn’t work. From the Google report, “Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no \u00a0count in any of the four strong SMART signals… in other words, \u00a0models based only \u00a0on those signals can never predict more than half of the \u00a0failed drives…”<\/p>\n

No one repairs hard drives. When it breaks, you throw it away, along with your data. You could take it to DriveSavers<\/a> \u00a0to recover the data for about $2,000, but that’s \u00a0 \u00a0about it.<\/p>\n

These cold truths have been around for decades but people still (inappropriately) blindly trust that their hard drive will keep their data safe. Gawd, I sound like some amateurly written ad copy for hard drive snake oil or something. It sounds hokey but all this is true!<\/p>\n

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Here’s what I tell my friends when they tell me their hard drive just broke:<\/p>\n