CORRUPTION, WHEN DO YOU KNOW FOR SURE?

[pktruckdriver]

How does one know when you have corrupted files , or a corrupted database, or maybe a program or your computer is corrupted?


CORRUPTED

adj.)Marked by immorality and perversion; depraved.(v.)To destroy or subvert the honesty or integrity of.(v.)To become corrupt.


This is pretty simple, cut and dried, as they say. I am corrupted, but ...


But if someone, (me) wanted to make sure before he backed up everything that he was backing up a corrupt free system, how could he know for sure, is there a test for this?


I plan to use a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB USB 2.0
http://www.shopzilla.com/western-digital-my-book-wdh1u5000n-500-gb/656542794/compare

But have seen this stuff on the web all over the place about this product..


I just bought a My Book Essential 500 gbs external drive and after one week it stopped working now i see all over the net 1000s of people complaining about the same thing. I contacted western digital and they told me to replace the case or get some company to do data recovery (http://www.fixya.com/support/t458033-western_digital_book_premium_es_edition#). I put 5 years worth of work on there and after that it just stopped working. My question is why should i have to buy a new case or pay for data (http://www.fixya.com/support/t458033-western_digital_book_premium_es_edition#) recovery. How can this company get away with this



Anyone have a few suggestions, I could take this back to Wally World where I got it and get something else, but why, yes maybe it will not work properly, but maybe it will, but losing all this data would be very sad for me, not devastating though, just annoying, time consuming thing.


Thanks for your help

Patrick

[wilderness]

Believe thats an ongoing problem with the external drives.

Have a friend whom has backed up thousands of photo's (he's a photographer) to an external and it stopped working.

Made an inquiry with a local hot-shot geek and he provided that as a general rule it's the circuit boards that go bad in the externals from overheating.
In most instances, the drives may be installed in an external case, and although the cases are larger than the factory new externals, it seems to solve the issue.

If the drive itself goes bad, data recovery is quite expensive. In the $500 range.

[robert99]

My wife has been using that model of Mybook for 3 years or more without an issue. The internet is full of scare stories, mostly from people that have not read the basic instructions etc. Overheating is another fable.

If you want you can get an easily assembled Icybox (Germany), or similar, and stick a suitable standard hard drive inside - takes 5 minutes. The case is perforated aluminium with a cooling fan.

http://modtown.co.uk/mt/review2.php?id=icybox

[Dave Schwartz]

Patrick,

With most database software, the #1 cause of corruption is manually closing the program in the middle of a write operation. This is will corrupt just about any database.

The misfortune of a power outage during a write-to-disk operation may also cause corruptions.

The biggest problem with corruption in large databases is that you may not realize you have corruption until you try to read a record that is actually corrupt.

As for backups, the key is not one backup but a series of backups.

Personally, I use what used to be called the grandfather-father-son approach. I back up work-in-progress often during the day and once a week take the current backup off-site.

http://www.handybackup.net/backup-rotation-schedule.shtml


In my experience, incremental backups are not a good idea. (Incremental backups mean just backing up what has changed.) The problem is that does not work with a multi-backup approach as you need a complete backup set on each "archive."


Another idea that I do not like is the nightly backup/upload of files routine. The problem is, if you have arge backup files, it may take many hours to upload (say) 4 or 5 gb of data. Just when you need your backup you find that what you have been uploading is incomplete because not all the files were successfulyl uploaded.

So, what is the answer?

1) A program that allows you to create "projects" to be backed up combined with a schedule for backing up each project.
In other words, don't take your whole hard drive. There is just no point in that. If your machine crashes, you will not likely be able to restore the whole thing. You'll have to reinstall stuff anyway.

Just take the data.

2) Backup locally often.
Nightly at (say) 2am is a good idea.

3) Grandfather-father-son the archives off site periodically.
Even if it is only once every two or three weeks, you will have protection for your computer life which exists on your hard drive.

4) Run a doomsday test.
That is, walk in one day and say, "My house has burned down. How do I get my stuff back?"

When you play "doomsday" you will find out what you haven't been backing up that you should have. Of course, you may not know until you need it.

A good time to do this is whenever you are replacing your primary computer. Sure, you are going to install all the software, but instead of just hooking the old and new machines together, try to restore your files from backup to the new computer.

The first time you run Internet Explorer and look for one of the hundreds of favorites you use every day, you will say, "Damn! I should have backed those up." Logins and passwords for the dozens of forums you participate in is another that is commonly lost. Another thing is all the license information for web-based software installs or even the installs themselves.

How do you suppose I know what you will forget to back up? Because I forgot it myself, of course.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Dave Schwartz

[pktruckdriver]

Thank you one and all I will investigate these ideas and pray my database is not corrupt and proceed as if it is not.

Now turning a comuter off is the main cause of corruption, well that is easily fixed, just do not turn off the comouter while it is being used, easy enough, right?

Running around wondering , is I guess kinda crazy, if all works well now, then assume all is well, a fan for "My Book" to avoid overheating may be a great idea.

My 1st attempt was using an off site web based service called Carbonite, but was unable to reach these people when i actually had a crash and was unable to retrieve my data, i was out 50.00 for the service, and had no data retrieved after a crash.


I hope to prevent that scenario from happening again, and I am niave when it comes to these things, but am told by everyone to back it up, you got to back it up, well i am going to try, but just wanted to ask around first, and when at Wal-Mart got the My Book , as it was on sale, and I thought it was what I needed, and could it be just a storage device for my database and other stuff too.

Question here is this, say I do weekly back-ups, or the Grandpa-pa-son thingy and do it more often, should I have more devices for the backups to go onto, say the nightly or the weekly go onto a zip drive, once, and then 2-3 different External Hard drives, in case i did get corrupted, then the chances of having 1 backup that is not corrupted is possible, instead of having only one backup, does any of this make sense, or am ii BEING WAY TOO PARANOID??


Just a few questions about backing up


thx
patrick

[facorsig]

am ii BEING WAY TOO PARANOID??

If I paid $50 for backup software and received no value, the argument could be made that I should be more paranoid because I should lack confidence in the solution.

A friend of mine reformats his hard drive every year to remove the clutter optimize his system. He backs up to a zip drive. He is a database specialist and does this for a (very good) living so this could be an example to follow (although I do not myself). I use IDrive, one of the partial backup approaches Dave mentions.

Fred