A lesson in "I told you so" with not backing up data you can't afford to lose

[UsandThem]

So over the years here, anytime someone has posted in the storage subforum asking for help in getting back data "they can't afford to lose" on a dead drive, I usually say if they didn't have a backup, they are in big "doo doo". It sounds kind of cold to say that, but my hope was more people would see the thread and backup their data.

Well, my youngest son last night began having computer problems, and soon after his Samsung 850 EVO died. The problem? My son's last backup of data/files he really needs was last backed up 3 months ago, and it is stuff he updated/worked on daily up until his drive died. I gave him an external drive and for years I have stressed for him backup any important stuff on it he can't afford to lose. I feel bad for him, but sometimes a person needs to experience it in order to realize how badly it sucks.

Lesson here? Always backup any data you can't afford to suddenly disappear. I imagine that once I replace the drive and my son begins storing his data on it, I bet he learned a very valuable lesson today he remembers going forward.

 

[VirtualLarry]

YES! I had the learn "the hard way" too. Even so, I'm lazy, like most humans, and don't always follow "best practices".

One thing that I will suggest, to people that have had this happen to them, or potentially happen to them:

1) Get a 4-bay NAS. Popular with four identical-model drives. Set it up in RAID-5, or RAID-10. Connect it to your LAN.
2) Get Macrium Reflect (Free) edition. (You can pay for it too.) Use the backup scheduler to set up bi-weekly full backups to the NAS, along with daily incremental or differential backups (only backs up files that changed from the last full backup).
3) Leave your PC running 24/7, connected to the LAN. (*)

Voila, easy DAILY backups, that are basically fire-and-forget, without you having to "bother" to backup. (*THIS TAKES NEARLY ALL OF THE 'HASSLE' OF 'HAVING TO BACKUP' AWAY!)

Yes, you should check the backup scheduler logs in Macrium, sometimes it fails to find the NAS and backup that day. But generally it works trouble-free.

(*) Macrium really prefers a WIRED connection, wifi doesn't always work so well for backup/restore.

This was my attempt at channeling my "inner Kaido".

 

[13Gigatons]

Crap....haven't run a backup in weeks....oh noes...

 

[MalVeauX]

It's a hard lesson to learn.

Today's generations are growing up in a mobile environment where almost everything is indeed in their clouds. But any of them using Mac/PC have some responsibility to learn what they must do to achieve a reliable and restorable backup. Plus it costs money and takes time and effort. Hard to market that to people. Compared to just hitting the "accept" button to some paragraph for permission on a phone that you don't actually read.

Very best,

 

[UsandThem]

Just got done running to Best Buy (so freaking busy) and getting him a new 860 EVO. Threw it in and installed Windows, and it was nice and speedy. His computer is a little older, so no need to mess with a NVMe drive until it gets upgraded (not anytime soon based on current CPU availability and pricing).

He asked if we could send the drive off to get his data back, and I explained how SSDs work and told him it probably wouldn't work (depending on what died on the 850 EVO). I then showed him the prices of the mail-in data recovery services, and he decided he didn't want to pay that kind of money, LOL.

He does coding/modeling, and I guess it was a file he worked on daily for the last several years. At least he has a 3 month old version to go back to, and didn't lose everything he had worked on. He just turned 18, so I guess this is a good life lesson for him to learn so in 20 years he doesn't suddenly lose all of his pictures, tax documents, financial docs, etc because he didn't save the data to the cloud / local backups.

 

[Shmee]

The 850 Evo might still be under warranty at least. 5 Year warranty on those drives.

 

[UsandThem]

The 850 Evo might still be under warranty at least. 5 Year warranty on those drives.

It's one of my oldest ones, and it was one of the first two 850 EVO drives I bought were in 2015 (so would just be outside of the warranty period).

The one in my laptop has around 12,500 active hours, and the one that died probably had around 17,000 active hours based on the last time I looked at the SMART data around 6 months ago. It really didn't have that many writes to it (maybe around 50TB), but I guess time finally did it in. I believe this is the first SSD in our household that has truly died from being used since I began using them in 2010 or so.

 

[Shmee]

Ah ok. I had an 850 EVO die on me a couple years back, good thing it's warranty replacement is still working fine

 

[UsandThem]

No so luck with it being in warranty.

On a side note, my oldest son (who is nosy and always wants to know what his brother is doing) saw me working on his PC, and asked what I was doing. I told him his SSD died and he lost some data since he didn't have any current backups. He kind of became a little wide-eyed when he heard the "data loss" part.

Upon hearing that, he went back to his room and probably backed up his data on his external drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Upon hearing that, he went back to his room and probably backed up his data on his external drive.

Since you have two sons, and yourself (at least), why not consider a whole-home NAS unit, with separate password-protected shares for each member of the household, to use with Macrium Reflect Free (assuming that you all run Windows). It seems to me that would be better than individual ad-hoc backup occasionally to an external. Just saying.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Lesson here? Always backup any data you can't afford to suddenly disappear. I imagine that once I replace the drive and my son begins storing his data on it, I bet he learned a very valuable lesson today he remembers going forward.

This^^

For some odd reason, it seems this has to happen at least once before you learn your lesson. Also happened to me once upon a time. It's just one of those things you have to experience for yourself, I guess.

Always have a backup strategy, and test your backups regularly. There are few things worse then thinking you have a backup, which then turns out to not work, or be corrupted...

Then there are the people who're completely incapable of learning from either their own, or others mistakes. I'm tired enough of those, that I don't bother anymore.

 

[UsandThem]

Since you have two sons, and yourself (at least), why not consider a whole-home NAS unit, with separate password-protected shares for each member of the household, to use with Macrium Reflect Free (assuming that you all run Windows). It seems to me that would be better than individual ad-hoc backup occasionally to an external. Just saying.

I really don't trust them (being millenials and all) sharing any drive with me and my wife's data on it. I know this generation thinks they are so much smarter than us Gen Z peeps, but they have had their fair share of blunders when doing stuff on their PCs. They have gotten tricked by clicking on malware infested sites, and clicking on links in emails. I've had to clean both of their PCs a few times over their childhood.

Plus, I really like keeping my PC's backup drive offline until I need to write/retrieve data from it. I figure if I showed them how to backup their own data (and provided free drives to them just for that purpose), the ball is in their court when it comes to backing stuff up they don't want to lose. Not to mention, I also showed them where they can save their data (they don't currently have large amounts) in "the cloud" for free as well.

They just get lazy sometimes, but it's my job to get them trained, through college, and then out of the house and let them spread their wings.

 

[exo_HD]

So over the years here, anytime someone has posted in the storage subforum asking for help in getting back data "they can't afford to lose" on a dead drive, I usually say if they didn't have a backup, they are in big "doo doo". It sounds kind of cold to say that, but my hope was more people would see the thread and backup their data.

Well, my youngest son last night began having computer problems, and soon after his Samsung 850 EVO died. The problem? My son's last backup of data/files he really needs was last backed up 3 months ago, and it is stuff he updated/worked on daily up until his drive died. I gave him an external drive and for years I have stressed for him backup any important stuff on it he can't afford to lose. I feel bad for him, but sometimes a person needs to experience it in order to realize how badly it sucks.

Lesson here? Always backup any data you can't afford to suddenly disappear. I imagine that once I replace the drive and my son begins storing his data on it, I bet he learned a very valuable lesson today he remembers going forward.

Oh man.... you have no idea how relevant this post is to me right now. Around just two days after you posted this, my one-year old NVMe suddenly died. And, just like your son, my last backup of my important files was 4 months ago, way back in August. As a music producer, what had upset me the most was losing all my music project files. I can do without anything else, but my music projects? They're like my children, I worked so hard on them. Jeez. Well I think it's safe to say I've definitely learnt my lesson here.

So far I've surmounted this situation by investing in an SSD (WD SN750) that isn't from some crappy Chinese brand. Once I get it, the first thing I'm gonna do is set-up an automated cloud backup. And also in the future I'm planning to setup an NAS.

P.S. I'll be making a post soon about my whole SSD fiasco.

 

[MalVeauX]

Oh man.... you have no idea how relevant this post is to me right now. Around just two days after you posted this, my one-year old NVMe suddenly died. And, just like your son, my last backup of my important files was 4 months ago, way back in August. As a music producer, what had upset me the most was losing all my music project files. I can do without anything else, but my music projects? They're like my children, I worked so hard on them. Jeez. Well I think it's safe to say I've definitely learnt my lesson here.

So far I've surmounted this situation by investing in an SSD (WD SN750) that isn't from some crappy Chinese brand. Once I get it, the first thing I'm gonna do is set-up an automated cloud backup. And also in the future I'm planning to setup an NAS.

P.S. I'll be making a post soon about my whole SSD fiasco.

It's not a question of if, it's always when. Setting up a mirror based NAS as a working environment will help avoid fault based loss and allow expansion. The backup would be to something else, depends on the capacity needs before assuming cloud will handle it (cloud can be a nice idea, but you have to have bullet proof internet for high capacity stuff and rebuilding by downloading may not be ideal if we're talking over 1TB of data). Three physical copies will often times be enough to keep a working physical copy alive when something happens. All three separate.

Very best,

 

[kschendel]

It's right up there with "only floss the teeth you want to keep." (No, I'm not a dentist.)

"Only back up the data that you care about."
"Backups are worthless. It's the restore from backup that's priceless."

My brother lost a string trio to a disk crash, a couple decades ago. The world, not to mention him, is poorer for it.

I try to educate my friends about backups and I get a lot of blank looks....

 

[MalVeauX]

I try to educate my friends about backups and I get a lot of blank looks....

It's even harder now to get that message across since most people walk around with their living memories in their phone, backed up to a cloud (whether they know it or not) but can't recover it unless they go to a store to get help or something. Some of course don't even have that and if their phone dies, everything goes with it. Lots of things come with a cloud service attached now, so the idea of back up is there, but it's also allowing people to be even more careless and ignorant to the idea of restoring data after something happens.

And when someone is building a PC? The last thing they want to do it axe their budget to build in a NAS or backup solution let alone a 3 step program!

You're totally right, the backups are worthless, restoring is what's priceless! No backup solution is worth a damn if you cannot restore the data reliably and rapidly for your needs. This is another reason I loath RAID 5 and up array solution suggestions, as if these people ever had to rebuild an array to salvage data on something with serious capacity.

Very best,