On the Hard Drives to Hell

At the end of last summer I made a mistake, unplugging an external drive before the heads stopped. ZAP. Thankfully I had everything backed up on an additional external drive. 3 days later the power supply on the good external drive went and, while I had all data backed up on this drive, I freaked out. Being in the middle of our season, I had a bit of a nervous time as the techie I took it to repaired the power supply. All data was there, except for the lifetime collection of music files ripped from an old cd collection and all the downloads. Bugger. But I had the important stuff. Like 10 years of photos, for example. But only 1 copy. Yikes.
I made back ups of everything on 2 new external drives, cleaned everything up on my computer drive, all just in time to go to New Zealand. All was good. We took AJ's laptop to NZ, with a new external drive for back up while there. Of course, I put the complete series collection of Frasier on that external and we enjoyed watching the series. Until, of course, one night I fell asleep watching and woke to a bright light of the laptop in my face and - without thinking, unplugged the external before shutting down the computer. You got it. Another dead external drive.
We got home from NZ to get to serious work. I fired up the home computer only to find that it was groaning and complaining of belly-aches or whatever hard drives complain about. Then, I couldn't access it to even run a diagnosis. Dead. But, I did still have 1 external drive with all good files on it.
That brings us to this week. I've been fervently capturing HD video from NZ & old footage now in HD, transferring the files immediately to 2 external drives that I am now babying like nothing before. In and out with 20 to 50Gigs at a time, cleaning the local disc often, doing what needs to be done. Then, 4 days ago, I get a prompt from Vista saying my hard drive is imminent to fail. I run a S.M.A.R.T. scan and it takes 3 seconds to fail. I run a couple of other utility scans and they say the same thing. Alas, I've spent 3 days sorting out every file on my computer, cleaning old stuff, new stuff, ugly stuff, good stuff. And you know what? This time, everything is pared down to perfection, my E & F external drives clean as a whistle and fully diagnosed as good and exact replicas of each other. Every file on the computer drive is doubly backed up.
I finally learned to take this stuff seriously. While on the Hard Drives from Hell, down 2 hard drives in 2 months and 3 external drives in 7 months, I'm at least 3 or 4 computer IQ points smarter. When capturing HD, downloading files, and moving stuff around as often as I do, especially in the size of files we use for HD footage, there's a ton of room for bad sectors and blocks to reveal their ugly heads. And if I don't stay on top of chkdsk and defrag, use diagnostic tools at least periodically, and check in the events section of Admin Tools, I won't see warnings or know what's going on behind the scenes.
So, if you've sent me an email this past week and I've been a little tardy replying, there you have it. I've been sorting, weeding, saving, deleting 800Gig of files and backing them up. Alas, I've learned something. Finally. Likely a good time to learn too. We still have 35+ hours of HD video to capture, which will no doubt fill another drive. I wonder if I'll be smarter this go 'round...