I had a hard disk fail on my laptop a bit ago. It was surprisingly sudden. I opened up the laptop, say the power level, moved to another room and the screen was blank. And the disk was completely dead. I have had the old spinning disks fail and they complain before they fail. They start to have bad sectors and they gripe about things. I guess it makes sense that SSD does not do the same. It just dies. One moment, everything is fine. The next, nothing.
So, backups are more interesting to me nowadays…
It occurs to me that it would be really nice to not have to re-build me system. I was trying to use a boot thumbdrive and it had too old a system version. Everything worked but 0 wifi. So, no, nothing worked and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth involved.
I want to have another disk, the exact same size as the one that I am using, and put that one into an external enclosure. But I see fw does not sell one. Does anyone have recommendations or suggestions for this? Or is it just too obvious to talk about?
If SSDs fail in this way, I am surprised that I do not see more discussion of how to set up safe backups on duplicate drives that are externally connected. Do people just not do this very often?
Yeah, SSDs do tend to die very suddenly. From reports, that has happened since the beginning.
I learned to make backups long ago, the hard way – by losing weeks of irreplaceable work, because I’d been blithely certain that my hard drive wouldn’t die without warning, no matter what the reports from other people said. So now I keep backups religiously, updating them at least once a week.
I don’t attempt to keep a bootable copy of things, I just make copies of my Linux home directory and a few other files and directories. If/when something goes wrong, I still have to reinstall the OS and my software, but my backups ensure that I still have all of my data.
If I wanted a bootable backup to protect against SSD failure on my FW16, I’d go with a second SSD of an identical capacity and use RAID-1. With a FW13, I don’t think you have that capability (the FW16 only got it a couple weeks ago, with the expansion card that allows two extra SSDs), so I don’t have any experience in that area to help. Sorry. Maybe someone else can suggest an alternative solution.
Hm. I am seeing something that is making me worry about my laptop and I need to have a backup.
I think it would be ideal if I could buy the same type of drive I have in the laptop now (see details below), put that into an enclosure with a USB-C port and … keep the disks synchronized, even if I have to do it manually. But fw does not sell this solution? Hm. Seems like a missed opportunity.
I can have a disk to do backups as described above, but then if my disk goes I need to buy another. But if I have another, why could I not use that for backups? A bootable backup? And around it goes again.
I can buy one disk to do backups on and one disk to just keep until there is a failure. That seems lame. Hmmmmmm.
Nothing is really being missed as an opportunity here. What is being described is easily implemented in an external drive or NAS and nightly differential backups of the whole systems. (With weekly or monthly full backups)
Then a spare can be kept in it’s package and when it suddenly dies just restore the entire system to the replacement drive. It should take a matter of minutes if it is optimized.
I am not familiar with backup software for Linux but there are lots of options for windows. I personally use Macrium Reflect (no longer free, but it is inexpensive). When one has a failure, if the backups has been working properly, most systems can be back up in an hour.
Sync important files constantly (Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc.) and the SSD going bad becomes a non-issue. If it truly is critical then operate a laptop with RAID 1.
If buying a second drive is really that much of an issue then run a “clone” routine every night with your externally attached backup SSD.
Yes, but I want to buy another one of the exact same disk that I bought from fw and put that into an enclosure so that, if there is a problem in the future, I can just pull the disk out of the enclosure and put the disk into the laptop. Does fw sell such an enclosure? They could. I would certainly prefer to buy one from fw than from some nameless offshore vendor.
So now I keep backups religiously, updating them at least once a week.
Sorry. Maybe someone else can suggest an alternative solution.