Crashed hard drive...

[MikeC]

Someone should make a fire/flood/tornado/quake proof computer. case.. that way it could survive anywhere. I'm sure the military makes them!

I think the military just puts the computers behind reinforced concrete walls three feet thick with bomb proof doors and armed guards.

Just think of the parameters you want, a computer case that needs air flow to keep the internals at a working temperature but yet water and heat proof and protected against impact damage. Even fire resistant safes fail after time due to the air inside heating and the contents cooking.

Until the damage that Katrina leveled I thought a safe deposit box in the same town that I live in was safe for my personal papers/data. The logic was, the house might get destroyed but if the whole town gets destroyed the damage is so bad everyone would have to rebuild their lives. Now, I am thinking of shipping backups to my sister in another state, several hundred miles away, to be put in a safe deposit box there. If both locales get hurt, a major part of the US would be missing and who would care at that point.

 

[ba_hiker]

Someone should make a fire/flood/tornado/quake proof computer. case.. that way it could survive anywhere. I'm sure the military makes them!

I think the best bet so far is storing the files remotely on external and secure servers. You can even encrypt them so even if the provider gets broken into it wouldn't do them any good.

Fire is pretty hard to protect against. You do not actually need to 'burn up' a drive to destroy the data on it. In fact it does not even need to be scorched, all that needs to happen is the temp reaches the curie temprature which for iorn is about 1000K (1300f). The temp for iron oxide is not well documented, but may be below 500K (440 f).

CDs (and backup tapes) suffer damage at similar (or lower) temps. Tapes often fail because the acitate backing hardens and becomes brittle.

The only real solution is off site storage. Fire safes and containers are allowed to reach about 460 f, after 1 hour of fire (in a typical residential construction) and 'pass', if UL 1 hour rated. Unrated safes are often less robust. providing only 10 or 15 minute rateings. The fire safe mentioned earlier is rated as 1 hour 350 degrees which is pretty good if located away from heavy construction, which would retain high temps or conbustion for over 1 hour.

'Fire proof' consturction often results in hotter fires if it starts to burn. Combustable liquids and plastics often burn hotter than wook (about 650 f) and are outside the rating of the safe. Do not locate fire safes in a basement or any location where burnt or burning materials may collect.

Pelican cases are good for water protection, but not for shock (tornados) or fire (the case burns at moderate temps). Cases lined with foam pockets may provide some shock protection, at the cost of a more easily ignited case, with more fuel present.

HD drives may last 3 to 5 years, but are unlikely to last much longer. Running the drive hot (above 145 f) will reduce the drive life conserdably (perhaps to minutes). Voltage fluctuations also are problematic.

Many modern drives have S.M.A.R.T technology build in. This is a method for the drive to communicate internal conditions to the external computer system. S.M.A.R.T. errors include recovered retries (over some limit), high temps, low voltages, slow spin or drive starts and other bits. S.M.A.R.T. errors are significant and any drive getting them should be replaced. The only problem is getting access to them...

I use a 3Ware hardware raid controller card. It reports them to me via email or a built in web server. S.M.A.R.T. errors generally precede failure by 1 to 2 weeks (except in the face of catastrophic destruction). Hardware raid is better than software raid, in that you can reboot a system that has a boot drive failure with hardware raid, but can not with software raid (its really part of the driver or OS).

I have had 3 failures since I started using it (including a system board failure) and have not lost any data. MB raid does not survive a MB failure... S.M.A.R.T. errors alerted me to another drive failure before it happened. I swapped the drive and rebuilt the cluster, without loosing data.

NB: not all raid technologies provide any data security at all some are optimized to increase drive throughput/access speed only. I believe raid 1, 10 and X are best for small clusters, and 5 is OK for bigger ones.

 

[ba_hiker]

I think the military just puts the computers behind reinforced concrete walls three feet thick with bomb proof doors and armed guards.

There are many federal records centers which manage government backups of paper and computer records. They use either what you suggest or in at least one case, a concrete room in an abandon silver mine about 600 ft underground in the sierras. The room has walls of 2 ft thick
concrete, lined with steel, double vault doors, guards, etc.

My company uses the same facility, plus another several states away. Magnetic and paper records are sent to one on a weekly basis, and to the other electronicly every other night.

This is considered safe.

 

[mars2u]

There are many federal records centers which manage government backups of paper and computer records. They use either what you suggest or in at least one case, a concrete room in an abandon silver mine about 600 ft underground in the sierras. The room has walls of 2 ft thick
concrete, lined with steel, double vault doors, guards, etc.

My company uses the same facility, plus another several states away. Magnetic and paper records are sent to one on a weekly basis, and to the other electronicly every other night.

This is considered safe.

That reminds me of a funny story...I was in the pharmaceutical industry years ago and were required to be compliant per FDA regulations. I met a few FDA agents that had some great stories. Basically all the drugs you take have literally millions of documents that Pharma companies are required to keep. One in particular kept all their documents in underground strorage. It flooded...FDA wasn't happy and cited them. So much for thinking your stuff is ever safe.

 

[Land Locked]

Safe??? That reminds me of a funny story also. Back in the early 90's
we had an old bank safe in the back of our office. This thing was HUGE,
the inside of this monster had a couple of small shelfs inside. I thought
it would be a good place to store our accounting backups. This is back
in the days when everything was backed up to 5 1/4 floppies. After awhile
I started to have problems with the floppies, then it dawned on me, this
was a huge IRON safe, it was so old it had magnetic properties and was
corrupting the floppies!!! Went out and bought a fire proof 4 drawer filing
cabinet and the problems stopped.

 

[D_B]

Just a note on CDs used for storage of data ... one research found that the quality of the CD was not very important compared to how they were marked/labled. the one comon denominator in CDs that had errors or bad data on them was that all were labled with stickon lables , didnt matter what brand or style or what was used to print them with. maybe the interaction of the glue and CD was causing it ... the end result was the recomendation to use marking pens to lable your storage CDs and save the fancy lables for stuff that didn't matter

DB

 

[mars2u]

Just a note on CDs used for storage of data ... one research found that the quality of the CD was not very important compared to how they were marked/labled. the one comon denominator in CDs that had errors or bad data on them was that all were labled with stickon lables , didnt matter what brand or style or what was used to print them with. maybe the interaction of the glue and CD was causing it ... the end result was the recomendation to use marking pens to lable your storage CDs and save the fancy lables for stuff that didn't matter

DB

I agree...I rarely put labels on mine. Especially since there were a couple of times I put the lables on the burned side by mistake

 

[glbirch]

Newegg has Maxtor 300GB internal drives for $127, Western Digital external 320GB for $225. External USB housings, to convert an internal drive to an external drive, are about $30 each.

I know, and it's a great idea in theory, but whenever I buy a larger drive for backups I think "Oooooh, look at all the extra storage space...".