My wife owns a business, she is a massage therapist. To assist her with running the business we got her an inexpensive computer. All seemed ok with the machine for the first year, but shortly after the warranty expired (go figure) the system crashed. All appeared to be lost when I went to look the machine over. The unit wouldn't even power on, we were afraid that all her client info was gone as we didn't know if the hard drive was damaged as well. We got a new system board for it, and replaced it, to no avail. We replaced the power supply, still no results. Fearing the worst that the hard drive was causing the problems, I removed it and installed it into an external USB enclosure to see if I can get to the data. The usb enclosure allowed the drive to spin up and to our hearts delight i was able to copy off the data quickly. We have since stopped using the drive as we have no confidence in it.
Currently we are using external USB drives for backups on hers and my systems, it takes about 1.5 hours to back up the entire system, but it's well worth the time. I believe that a MediaSmart Server would have been a great value to us in recovering her data since it does automatic backups and will allow you to restore a system. I wish I had one at the time.
Outsmart the S.M.A.R.T. Failure - 11-12-08 - 11-18-08
Categories: Backup and Restore
It doesn't matter which kind of hard drive you buy or how much you spend, all of them are destined to fail, crash, blow up, or whatever you want to call it. The point here isn't to make you believe all hard drives are bad. Quite the opposite in fact. What other type of great performing storage offers a massive amount of storage capacity (up to 1.5 terrabytes now in a single 3.5" drive) for such a great price?
Most home users rarely, if ever, back up their systems. If you fall into this camp, it means your photographs, financial records, legal papers, (basically, your entire digital life) may reside on a single hard drive. Remeber above when we said all hard drives are destined to fail? Well, yours is no exception. It's time to get serious about protecting your data, and that's where the HP MediaSmart Server comes in.
The HP MediaSmart Server, in conjunction with Windows Home Server, automatically backs up every Windows system on the network (unless configured otherwise). The backups are transparent, easy to set up, and easy to access for restoration. Backups are enabled by default when the HP MediaSmart Server software is installed, and transparently occur in the evenings. The Windows Home Server backup technology is highly efficient – backing up a single copy of files that may be duplicated across the network. Also, once a full backup is taken, only file changes are saved, not a new version of the entire file.
To Enter:
Express your Media'Smarts' by telling us about a time when a hard drive failed on you, or your computer crashed to an unrecoverable state. What happened? Did it work out, or was your data lost forever?
If you don't have a good crash story, tell us what you're currently doing for backup, how often you do it, and how long it takes you. Do you think the HP MediaSmart Server would make this easier for you?
For those not backing up, tell us why. How much of what you have on your computer is valuable and not recoverable? What are some of those thing?
All who enter by 11/18/2008 will be entered in a drawing to win a HP Digital Camera and a MediaSmart Home polo shirt! All who enter here before the grand prize drawing will be entered to win one of the two prize packages. Post to each contest thread by the end of the promotion, and that's 10 chances to win!
Week 4 Winner
The week 4 drawing winner of an HP Digital Camera and a MediaSmart Home Polo shirt is...
JohnBick!
Congratulations to our week 4 winner.
The weekly drawing may be over, but don't forget to enter here and every week until the big grand prize drawing on December 31st. Enter in each of the weekly drawings and that's 10 chances to win the grand prize!
See the "Express Your Media'Smarts' Giveaway" for full details
Learn more about the MediaSmart Server
Read More In: Backup and Restore
We hope that you're as excited to win the contest are we are to see your entries. Check back every week for a new scenario to test your MediaSmart Server expertise, and to jump on your chance to not only win the weekly drawings, but also be eligible for the grand prize! See the contest rules for more details!
We had all of our family pictures and music on a MyBook World Edition network storage drive. All of a sudden, it started disconnecting at random times from our network and we would have to turn it off and back on to reconnect. About two weeks ago, we realized this was happening with more and more frequency. I did some troubleshooting and found out that it was reporting that the hard drive status was "failed". I immediately started pulling all of our data off of that drive onto an external hard drive. I saved all of the pictures. During my attempt to try and save all of our music, the hard drive finally failed entirely. Luckily, my wife and I had about 90% of our music on our iPods, and I had to purchase and download a program off of the internet that allowed you to pull the music directly off of an ipod to your computer. We were VERY lucky. We saved all of our pictures and the vast majority of our music. I feel that if I had waited even one more day, we could have lost everything. If we had the ability to back that data up, my efforts on the hard drive failure would have been nothing more than using the backup and ALL of our data would have been saved. Fortunately, we were very lucky in the end, but I do not want to ever be in that situation again. The music could be replaced, but not our family pictures.
I currently backup to Carbonite and an additional hard drive I installed in my PC for backups. Have had some crashes in the past and learned the hard way. I would love to have a MediaSmart server, both for backups and for running applications like streaming audio and video.
When I was in college, I was putting the finishing touches on a criminal justice paper that I had been working on for weeks, and when I say finishing touches, I mean that the paper was done - I was working on formatting. All of a sudden, my computer's screen flashed and Windows gave me a critical error of some sort. I did not have the paper backed up at all and I spent all night long trying to recreate it. I turned something in, but in all honesty, it wasn't any good and I lost a lot of sleep over it. Needless to say, I backup my important documents from then on.
Member
- member since: 05/04/2008
- rank: 612 of 6700
-
location:
Gilbert, United States
- 2 forum threads started
- 23 comments
I have been backing up stuff from my personalized server but the Windows Home Server does it so much easier!
I can't tell you how many hard drives I have had go bad! But backups are mandatory with my setup. WHS makes this so much easier than I used to have to do!
Have a Sansa device or MP3 player, then check out The latest!
Follow Me on Twitter
I have my one main desktop computer that I stored all our family pictures, email, video, etc on. I never really thought about backing it up as all data was stored on a secondary hard drive in the machine and I thought I would get signs of soon to be failures before it would die. Well I came in one night and rebooted the PC and it would not come back on. Turns our the secondary hard drive had failed. The same hard drive that had the one and only copy of my sons 6 years of life on; not to mention all my email, documents, tax records, etc.
I had to have that files back there was no way around it and after $1,500 to the drive recovery place I did get all my files back. The next day after getting them back I bought my Media Smart server for a much more bargain price and now my data is safe and on more then one computer and hard drive.
I have been working with computers since I was a teenager and it seemed as though at least once a month I would have to do a full OS reinstall to fix some mistake playing with a file, or a program going ary. After losing many music, video, and picture collections, I got hip to backing up. I began to format my HDD's and partition them in a way that allowed the OS to be on one partition and kept my music, video, and pictures on another. That solved some problems, and caused others. At the time, the only thing that I could do was backup the main OS partition straight to DVD, which with all the appliacations and games that I had installed, usually spanned nine, or ten DVD's. Being such a long and arduous task, I would only backup once after a fresh installation of everything, leaving all new files since the backup to the binary gods. Even after all that, moving files from one partition to another was unbelievably slow. Eventually, I bought a MediaSmart Server, and life simply changed.
I must admit, the main reason I bought the MediaSmart was for central file location, and mass storage, but once I began to use MediaSmarts backup system, I was hooked. Since then, I have fully restored my PC at least twenty times, each in only about one hour, over fast-ethernet. If I had gigabit, which the MediaSmart supports, it would be a matter of minutes. I am now in colllege studying for an IT degree, and I can say that as long as I work with computers, (as we know them now) I will never be without a backup and restore solution just like this.
Just this past summer, my HD failed when power was cut off for some electrical box maintenance in my building. Something in the boot sector got mangled, so no boot! My PC came not with a full WinXP CD-Rom, but only with "original state" manufacturer's CD-Rs, which meant that I was out of luck with trying to repair the XP install: the included CD-Rs (as many undoubtedly know) reformat the HD, wiping all data.
I've saved the HD, and will get an outboard USB 2.0 enclosure,and cherry pick my critical data off, and then reformat and partition the drive for use as an external media storage drive...when I get around to it...(I'm procrastinating, obviously, putting out more critical fires)...if I had had a server for auto backup, this wouldn't have been such a downer! If frogs had wings... ;)
I currently have 15 x mv2010 Media Vaults to store & serve content(FTP / DLNA). Brilliantly constructed, solid and tucked away out of sight..except for the glowing blue lights. 27/7/365 machines that spin down after a preset time to utilize 17w of power or 35w at full throttle. Not bad..and I have yet to have Hard Disk failure in these units with set of 5 on their own PSU.
My laptops/tablets...another story. Corrupted boot sectors and other issues. Throw them in the freezer (yes, it has worked) and slave them to recover what you can before they give up the ghost to the clicking god.
DLNA HD streams on the mv2010 over gigabit networks are smooth as butter and beautiful on 47
I didn't have a crash, but a neighbor did. We tried everything to recover the data, but it was DOA. I tried several professional recovery programs and they all came up empty. His daughter lost all her itunes, pictures, and more importantly, her entire school years' worth of papers.
I backup my own system with a software program and I run two drives and save important stuff on the secondary unit as well.
My hard drive crashed about two years ago, got the "screen of death". I was very lucky because we had just put all of our photographs on discs so they were spared. I had to do a total factory system restore so everything else had to be downloaded again. Five days of Windows updates later, I was pretty much back in business, but I really don't want to go through that again. Thank you for the cool contest!
Upon my return home from Iraq in June 2008, I found out that my daughter's boyfriend had "trashed" my PC by downloading software loaded with viruses and spyware. I could not boot my computer without it erroring out within seconds of logging in. It was bad enough that he did not feel responsible for the damage or that he figured I could fix it myself. Luckily I had a new drive on hand to install and reload the OS. I then took the original drive and copied MOST - Not all - of the data over to the new drive while scanning for viruses. I also took the time to partition the new drive so the OS and data are seperate. If I had the MediaSmart server before the debacle, all the data would have been safely ensconced on the server and the rebuild could have taken less than the 3 days I spent rebuilding my PC. Moral of the story: keep "friends" away from your PC unless you know your data is safe.
Member
- member since: 05/05/2008
- rank: 2 of 6700
-
location:
Dutchess County, NY, United States
- 23 forum threads started
- 1098 comments
Backups (MSS and others) have saved me a number of times. Massive disk failures are not the only time you need a backup. Sometimes that famous "user error" will bite you, as it has me. Like when you realize a week later that you now need that file you deleted -- and the "trash" has been emptied?
I use the WHS/MSS backups nightly on all my clients. I use the BDBB Add-In to duplicate my backups and, regularly, to copy those backups to a drive that gets rotated to a safe-deposit box. I also synchronize my key folders to WHS/MSS shared folders nightly (using SyncToy v1) and use the PP1 functionality to copy all my shared folders to a removable drive that rotates to a safe-deposit box.
Before I had my MSS I used the natve backup function to save key items to an external drive. AND I used Windows OneCare backup to do the same to another drive. While I have stopped rotating any of these to the safe-deposit box, the nightly incremental backups continue to this day! (I vowed to stop this after a year with my MSS -- a time that is quickly approaching!)
And my financial files (and select pictures and a few other files) also get copied to rotating "lockable sticks" that are kept in the cars. (This allows portability and the ability to use other computers when travelling as well as being another backup!)
Yep, I am paranoid and proud of it.
And you will be too after you get bit once!
...JohnBick
Yes I lost it all twice. After the first time I know purchased an external backup drive that sits connected via a usb connection. I choose now to backup key information that served me well the 2nd time it happened. I understand this Media Smart Server product is a backup throughout my house cpus, etc, (this will surely kill my chances of winning this contest!) but what I don't get isnt it more cost effective for me to do what I do. This system costs over $500 for 500gb. My 1gb back up drive cost me $140 bucks. Why do i need a processor attached to a back up if it is just used for a back up?
Nedly44 said: Yes I lost it all twice. After the first time I know purchased an external backup drive that sits connected via a usb connection. I choose now to backup key information that served me well the 2nd time it happened. I understand this Media Smart Server product is a backup throughout my house cpus, etc, (this will surely kill my chances of winning this contest!) but what I don't get isnt it more cost effective for me to do what I do. This system costs over $500 for 500gb. My 1gb back up drive cost me $140 bucks. Why do i need a processor attached to a back up if it is just used for a back up?Just to answer your question briefly, it's all about the convenience. Now that they've FINALLY got all the bugs out of the backup routine, this does it automatically. You set it and forget it. I keeps daily, weekly, and monthly backups of all your PC's. You can instantly restore an entire PC if your drive fails, simply by purchasing a new drive, plopping into the old PC, and telling WHS to restore your old PC!
On my current desktop I have an external hard drive. Unfortunately I manually backed up files and was quite lax about it. The last time I backed up before the unrecoverable crash was 6 weeks ago. I'm using my laptop right now because I'm trying to recover the main hard drives contents with a forensic CD. That I had my two SATA hard drives set to RAID0 is only compounding the problem. I think it's time fot 4 SATAs and go RAID0 +1 and automated external backup.
My last computer was browser hijacked, I tried everything to clean it up..finally gave up and bought my present HP Pavilion, (which I love). I now back up to an external.
I had all of our family pictures and important documents scanned which resided on what I considered to be a high tech power user desktop. One Saturday, I walked down the hall of our home and passed the door of my office where this computer was located. I detected a burning smell. Needless, to say, I lost so very, very much which was not retrived. The hard drive was scorched. My wife could not understand so I was in a dilemna. Going forward, I do have external drives but I began to use one of these backup online services where you lease space on their server. This has not been very convenient. It does back everything up but retrieving lost data is sometimes a problem. I need a new solution.
Well, about 10 years ago I used the compressed disc feature of Windows. My computer hiccuped (with an overfilled hard drive) and I was not able to boot up or access files. Luckily a friend of mine is a bit of a computer guru and he was able to recover my personal files and burn them to CD.
I do have my data on CDs now, but using a Media Server would be so much better.
View unverified member's comment - posted by Ruby Welch
I have a lot of important files on my computer but my photos are by far the most important. I currently back them up to dvd but that is time consuming and I don't like to admit it but I don't do it often enough. I guess I'm really lucky I haven't lost anything yet. The HP MediaSmart Server would definitely simplify things for me and give me peace of mind knowing my priceless memories are safe.
I've been lucky enough to not have a hard drive fail yet, but I did lose baby pictures from an SD memory card. Luckily it was only a few weeks worth of pictures, but the wife was still very upset. The card somehow split in half and I was never able to get it working again. Now I backup pictures to my HP pavillion regligiously. I backup the laptop to a 500gb external. I keep the external at my office. So now whether its a fire, theft, or HD failure; I have a backup somewhere. Oh, and coming soon: all media on my PS3.
We have a hard drive mirrored by another in a separate system as our back up
there are scheduled backups at regular times as well as the ability to manually start a backup , which is later copied to the other drive when it mirrors it , so if one were to fail we would have the other backup - so all of the machines are doubly backed up and protected
very little effort to ensure no loss of anything
I had a friend whose hard drive crashed forever. She had most of her important files backed up, so she just bought a new computer.
Thread is locked, no more posts may be added.
Sponsored Links
Copyright © 2009
Capable Networks LLC.. All Rights Reserved.
RSS |
Privacy Policy |
Advertise With Us |
Terms of Use |
About Us |
Contact Us |
Site Map
Our Capable Community Network:
DVR playground |
MediaSmart Home |
MotoDash |
My DigitalEntertainer |
My Open Router |
Pogoplugged |
Robo Community |
Sansa Community |
Sling Community |
TechLore |
TiVo Community |
TouchSmartDevZone
This community site, MediaSmartHome.com (including its terms of use, privacy policy and content), is offered by and managed by Capable Networks LLC, not by Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). HP is not responsible for the performance of this community site or for any content posted on the site nor is HP liable for any damages or losses caused or alleged to have been caused by the use this Capable Networks community site.
