NOTHING I have that is irreplaceable is on less than 2 drives nor are they ever connected at the same time. You're just asking to lose files if you only save them on one drive.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
163 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37737 readers
48 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If you have your data in one location, you have your data in zero locations.
The 3 2 1 of data retention is important
3 copies of your data
2 local
1 off-site
The 2 stands for on 2 different mediums. So HDD and tape for instance. Or HDD and SSD. Or SSD and DVDs. Whatever combo you choose that fits your needs. This (minimizes) the chance of loss of both.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I know a lot of people who put their single copy of files on USB drives "for safety"
But in the case of the article looks like it was video shot and saved directly from the camera (professional cameras like the blackmagic save directly on USB SSDs), so there wasn't time to backup it
Looking at Blackmagic's pro-level cameras, they support external USB storage and dual SD Cards and dual CFast cards.
So there's certainly no requirement to use external USB storage.
But, they also say:
When shooting is complete you can simply move the external disk to your computer and start editing from the same disk, eliminating file copying!
Rather unfortunate advice.
I know a lot of people who put their single copy of files on USB drives "for safety"
But in the case of the article looks like it was video shot and saved directly from the camera (professional cameras like the blackmagic save directly on USB SSDs), so there wasn't time to backup it
load more comments
(9 replies)
The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products "sold by Amazon" was a guarantee that there wouldn't be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.
Now they don't police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the "SEO" of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they're susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.
It basically makes it so that they're no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it's worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I get a lot of folks are correctly pointing out the need to back up data but isn’t that a little bit of victim blaming? This isn’t a situation where the guy had a 10 year old drive with all his photos and videos sitting around unbacked up. He had a new drive and it failed. Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
Can we agree that brand new drives aren’t supposed to fail?
No.
The typical failure rates, for pretty much all electronics, even mechanic stuff, form a "bathtub graph": relatively many early failures, very few failures for a long time, with a final increasing number of failures tending to a 100%.
That's why you're supposed to have a "burn in" period for everything, before you can trust it within some probably (still make backups), and beware of it reaching end of life (make sure the backups actually work).
That's absolutely true in the physical sense, but in the "commercial"/practical sense, most respectable companies' QA process would shave off a large part of that first bathtub slope through testing and good quality practices. Not everything off of the assembly line is meant to make it into a boxed up product.
Apparently even respectable companies are finding out that it's cheaper to skimp on QA and just ship a replacement item when a customer complains. Particularly when it's small items that aren't too expensive to ship, but some are doing it even with full blown HDDs.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Indeed. An old EE mentor told me once that most component aging takes place the first two weeks of operation. If it operates for two weeks, it will probably operate for a long, long time after that. When you're burning in a piece of gear, it helps the testing process if you put it in a high temperature environment as well (within reason) to place more stress on the components.
load more comments
(1 replies)
They should at least try to recover the data. Maybe a data recovery program like spinrite would just do it. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm .
Not running raid, not backing up, and not even trying the simplest recovery approaches is just sloppy and lazy. Do at least one of the three.
Like someone else said. Expect the biggest risk of failure when you buy it. Then like maybe 5 years out rising failure rates. Refreshing the disk pattern as it gets older can help too.
load more comments
(2 replies)
WD writing fake reviews?
There's no way an actual human wrote such an extensive, detailed but overall dry of content as a review, unless they got it for free in exchange of an enthusiastic review
Edit: the article shows screenshots of clearly fake reviews on Amazon from "verified" buyers. This is what I'm referring to fake reviews
AI generated article
The article is pretty human written.
It’s the Amazon reviews in the article being talked about.
load more comments
(5 replies)
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.
SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.
But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.
Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.
I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.
Good bot
load more comments
(1 replies)
In case anyone is in a similar situation, I can't say enough good things about PhotoRec. It saved my ass more than once from hard drive recovery down to SD cards.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Yeah, yeah, it's command line only, but once you get your stuff back it's worth learning!
load more comments
(2 replies)
And that's why RAID is a good idea.
For availability, yes, but RAID is not a substitute for proper backup procedures. E.g. - offsite, cloud, or automated scheduled local backups, or even regular data integrity checks.
True, but it will protect you from a single drive failing like this.
I don’t think the drive actually failed. The article said that the files disappeared from the drive one-by-one, which sounds like a firmware bug to me.
You could theoretically have the same problem due to a buggy RAID controller or driver.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Raid 0 right?
RAID 1. Raid 0 stripes data between disks, meaning you get much faster I/O speeds but if one disk fails, you lose it all. RAID 1 is when you have 2 (or more) disks and the data is mirrored between both. So if one does, you’ve got a perfect copy of it on the other disk. RAID 0 = “striped”, RAID 1 = “mirrored”
Extreme data loss!
Did they really abbreviate "paragraph" to "graf"?
Journalistic jargon: hed, dek, lede, nut graf/nutgraf
Yes, but it’s standard journalist speak and predates this article by a long time.
"Lede" I've heard because of the common expression "burying the lede." You're telling me "graf" is standard language for published articles?
load more comments
(1 replies)
SSDs are nice and fast but if the data table goes bad, you have lost everything. At least with a HDD you can still pull files off if filesystem table goes bad. Also unplugged SSD in a hot location will lose data quite readily. Always keep them powered to keep the bits.
We had the same problem here in our company. Don’t use theirs drives.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Data being lost on a drive isn't a reason not to purchase. If it were then we would never buy any drives.
Data loss is a reason not to purchase if it happens more often than with competing products, and that may be the case with these.
But a sample size of 1 or 2 does not prove it happens more than other products.
Pretty sure the sample size is hundreds or thousands. SanDisk would not bother with a firmware “fix” for something that only affected 2 drives. I had a SanDisk I bought recently have this exact same issue and when I went searching for the problem it was reported in a lot of places.
view more: next ›