hard drive death

[dangerman]

You need a client, there are loads but I use utorrent. Then you just need to find a torrent site like the pirate bay or kick ass torrents.

There is a big drive in this country at the moment to get rid of them, so the people who run them have set up proxy servers to dodge the restrictions. Try typing proxy bunker.co.uk into google and click on one of the links. Have a play around.

Be warned though, there is a lot of porn on there and sometimes the pop up adverts aren't good. Just close the pop ups as soon as they open, don't click on anything even if it says that you need to for security reasons - some can be quite convincing.

When you click on magnet links you should be able to select a default download client, that's where utorrent comes in.

Enjoy!

[Arzosah]

Thanks dangerman ... I can see I'll have to learn another language to decipher that ... a project for a weekend, I think. Sounds really promising though, and I'm trying to get rid of some CDs at the moment

[munchh]

I stopped using P2P when napster blocked me for downloading a Dr.Dre song, how was i to know him and Metallica were in federal court about it that week!

i think you will find the law has just changed, as with before digital, you bought music on tape or record, now they have extended it to digital/mp3 formats, so to have it in all formats you must have bought all formats.

i have always bought cds and made mp3s from them so i can have them at a certain quality, but i beleive that is now against the law.

they were talking about it all week on LBC.

[dangerman]

I could be wrong about the law. But honestly, I don't give one about their greedy money hungry licences. It's a load of crap and not a big deal... That's right, I said it! (Waits for the FBI to break through the windows.)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0wXeN6_FY

Flipping youtube links don't work - but this clip is important to humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0wXeN6_FY

[Arzosah]

Wrong post...

???

[Hamradioop]

Avoid torrents like the plauge. Just by using it you could get a visit from the BPI with an Anton Pillar Order https://www.bpi.co.uk/copyright-enforcement.aspx

better to use cloud storage better yet you own back ups regularly backed up and kept at a safe location or better two. http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/wels ... aid/036536

[munchh]

Avoid torrents like the plauge. Just by using it you could get a visit from the BPI with an Anton Pillar Order https://www.bpi.co.uk/copyright-enforcement.aspx

better to use cloud storage better yet you own back ups regularly backed up and kept at a safe location or better two. http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/wels ... aid/036536

Yes back to why i started this, i didnt do my second back up and now ive lost thd lot. Looks like its catastophic

i hate Clouds, dont use them at all.

[HBP]

Ive always been pretty anal about backing up twice, but ive just had a hard drive die before my second back up, music and pictures are the most annoying things ive lost on there, I have the cds, so I can make more mp3s, but I have a feeling ive lost some family pictures which I wont get back. gutted.

I have lost count of the number of people who have lost pictures etc through hard drives failing. It’s a terrible shame. Hard drives do and will fail so its important to plan for that.

One question, you say the hard drive died before your second back up, doesn’t that mean you have a first backup?

It may be possible to recover some data from a failed drive but if it’s a physical failure it isn’t cheap. Only last week I had a quote from a company for this. £700 to look at the drive to see it can be recovered (non-refundable) and £2000 to recover it. The decision was made that the info wasn’t that important! Does the drive show anything? Any errors?

One thing I have done in the past with USB drives is pull the drive out of the case and attach it to the computer in another way. USB caddy or physically to the motherboard if its a desktop. Its not the first time I ave had the USB interface in the drive fail but the drive its self is OK.

It sounds like you have been pretty good at backing up. Do you have any other copies or an old drive that you have used in the past that may have some of the pictures on?

I hope you find something.

Here are some thoughts for anyone interested from someone who has a far bit of professional experience in this field:

This is some of the enterprise level stuff I have done/seen:
1. Automatic replication of data to an identical system in another physical location. Very expensive to do but when your company can lose millions a minute, you can switch over to the duplicate system in seconds
2. Copy important data to backup tapes (Yes we still use them as they work and can store a lot of data) every day, Keep a copy of each tape for 7 days, keep 1 tape from each week for a month, keep one tape form each month for a year and keep one tape from each year for ever. Store them all in a big fire safe at another site or pay a company to come an collect them every day and store them in a certified facility
3. Use cloud based storage with replication of data to other parts of the cloud. Can be very expensive and small cloud companies can come and go.
4. Use cloud based storage with it backed up to data archiving solution so its stored somewhere else.

Here is what I have done for backups at home:
1. USB hard drive permanently attached to a computer with backup software running so data is automatically copied to the drive
2. USB hard drive that data is copied to on a regular basis. Hard drive is kept somewhere else. Office, family members house etc
3. Set up a 2nd computer at office, family members house etc. and use VPN software (logmein Hamachi) to copy data automatically to the other computer every night
4. Copied to stuff I really don’t want to lose onto archive grade DVDs and store them in a firesafe somewhere a long way from home
5. Copied stuff up to cloud based storage. Quite often I will encrypt it before doing this as its on someone elses infrastructure. I have 19GB of free dropbox which is quite handy

I always try to have at least 2 of these in place but the difficult part is keeping it all in sync so you need to be quite well organised.

Here are a few errors that I have come across that I ask anyone to please avoid:
1. I am ok, I have a backup. I save all my photos on a USB hard drive. Hard drive then fails and learns that only having one copy, even if it is on an external drive is not a backup. A back up is a minimum of 2 copies!
2. I backup all my data to a USB hard drive. Drive is left attached to computer and then both are stolen in a burglary. Google: francis ford coppola hard drive
3. Its ok, I sync all my photos etc to the cloud. I can get them anytime I want and I don’t have to fill my computer/phone/tablet up with my data. Cloud companies have technical problems and can go out of business. Also, a lot of cloud storage companies are just a front end to storage they lease from another company. What happens when someone else using that systems commits a crime and as they are based in the US, the FBI takes all the servers as evidence?

One final thought, be careful downloading music/movies from torrents etc. A lot of people do it but some copyright owners (or their supposed representatives) are getting very keen on taking people to court. Most governments are now brining in laws (not that we don’t already have perfectly good laws to deal with it) to crack down on this stuff so it’s always possible you may get a visit. Do your own risk assessment and make your own decision.

[munchh]

No mate, when I say before the second backup I mean I backed up to that hard drive but not my second back up, I was called away, I would normaly never turn off the pc before doing both.
I think thaf it is probly the board on thd disc as thd seagate software doesnt even see it neither dods thd biis

[HBP]

when I say before the second backup I mean I backed up to that hard drive but not my second back up

Door, horse, bolted & all that but it sounds like you are moving files rather than making multiple copies. Computer plus 2 backups would normally leave 3 copies so I guess you are moving the files from the computer to the hard drive?

If the vendor software cant see the drive then you may be out of luck. If you can find a local computer repair specialist, they might be able to pull something back by pulling the drive out, looking to see if they have a similar drive they could swap the electronics over from or even just connecting it to a different system. Might be worth a try for family photos.