Hard drive recovery

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, Peter Pieczora wrote:

> I've got a problem with one of the hard drives, which unfortunately is not
> under warranty anymore. It was RMA'ed at Hitachi and worked fine for last 4
> months. It was used on G4 workstation with OS X loaded.
> Yeasterday, drive started to give strange noise which would indicate actuator
> arm problem (drive is spinning on power up). I've tried to run dft fitness
> test but motherboard is not able to detect drive.
> I'm wonderring if any of you could help me find best way to recover, (if
> possible) all of the data.

Sounds like you got a couple of good suggestions for recovery.  At this
point I really want to remind everyone to backup.  If the data is
important enough that you are worried about whether recovery will be
possible when the drive fails, then it is important enough to backup.

Of course when & how to backup are decisions specific to the situation.
If you can stand to lose a week's data then weekly backups might be fine,
but if you need to be able to recover as much as possible then nightly
backups becomes a must[1].

Some important points on backing up:

- Filesystem mirroring won't replace a good backup scheme.  It won't even
come close.

- A backup that isn't off site isn't a backup at all.

[1] You can even go further of course.  Some companies run continuous
backups of databases and the like.  Our company (http://www.opentrend.net)
takes backups of our job/client and accounting databases every few hours
and shifts them offsite using a secure encrypted channel.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml