The Question is not Whether Your Disk Will Fail, Only When
Yesterday, the iMac that I got around Thanksgiving of 2006 started locking up and having a hard time booting. I booted from an installation disk, ran disk diagnostics, and discovered that it was disk access on my internal drive that was hanging. Drove to the local Best Buy, that being the closest place I could think of that would have disk drives, and got a new, one terrabyte, Firewire/USB/eSATA external drive, a Western Digital "My Book, Home Edition" to be precise. Spent an hour installing the OS on it, and another 4 hours restoring my Time Machine backup. Lost a week of changes, but got back most of my bits.
'twas a bummer to lose most of a day to getting my computer working again. Would have been a disaster had I not had a backup.
Remember, boys and girls, the question is not whether your disk drive will fail, only when your disk drive will fail.
Pictured below, from top to bottom, DSL modem, 500 GB backup drive, new 1 TB system drive, wifi router.
My internal disk failed completely during the install
My internal disk failed completely during the install on the new external drive. OS X no longer notices the drive, much less a formatted volume on the drive. I've tried Knoppix and Ubuntu CDs on this machine, and they work. If I hadn't had a backup, that would have been a good way to see if there was any easily-recoverable data on the disk.
HDs
Seems like HDs go out more often & more quickly these days. Good to back up. 8..32 GB flash drives help.
--J.
Consider using an offsite
Consider using an offsite backup solution like carbonite in addition to the external backup devices. Onsite backups are still vulnerable to environmental mishaps, (fire, theft, etc...)
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Just an FYI in case your
Just an FYI in case your disk ever becomes "unmountable" (happened to my HDD a few months ago) and the computer can no longer boot at all. If this happens, you've got seriously problems, especially if your stuff isn't backed up - mine wasn't.
You can (and should) download the materials to burn Knoppix, which as I understand is a pared down version of Linux OS. You can boot from the CD-ROM and transfer files to portable HDD without a hitch.
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