My usb disk collection ( or in other words BACKUP !!!!)

An ordinary day usually doesn’t start with the coffee maker  refusing to work , and your primary External Disk –call it disk1 from now on ( the one that you always carry with you saving your job) broken . Good thing I always have it synced with a backup disk –the one that ia call a life-saver (disk2 for the story )  ) .

So I started facing the situation . Ok , disk1  has no bad sectors , over a million files on it , and its benchmarks started to be very low . Defragmentation ok , checked it on another machine ok , format does not seem to do anything . Let’s start low level formatting it .

My office machine is a pretty good one ( for my standards ) . A win 7 64bit , with two 500gb disks , 8 Gb Ram and I Core I5 CPU . OK , grab  disk 2 ( backup was only 2 days old ) let’s do some benchmark test to check its status . Benchmark OK , defragmentation as low as 2% files all OK . As a had a time windows not needing anything , started to defrag it to see if I can zero it . A phone call asking me some feature that had to be tested locally , took my thought away from that ( along with the everyday end user support ) . Started local sql server , Internet information manager , set up a small project started debugging , two hours and a hanged debugger later , saw that  process explorer was using more tha 5 GB of ram . What was that . switching to the low level formatter window taught me that you can’t revive a  disk that has intelligence on its own , and gave me no option than stopping the low level format ( the sea tools from Seagate informed me already the the disk has errors and it was on warranty ) . Explorer still on 5 GB ram . Defragmentation still working , stopped it . No difference . The feature I refered earlier was already ftp’d on its correct location as it was built and free of errors ( I hope ) . so nothing currently working , let’s stop the process ( my mistake ) . Explorer restarted , disconnected disk 2 , reconnected it , where the heck are my files ????@#%^@$%^@$ .

Hopefully there was nothing serious that a usual check disk couldn’t handle ( to be sure I started recovering  a third disk I used in the whole process of moving files and I was sure that it was formatted and never used again , so if something went wrong , I could get some important stuff out of it ) .

Conclusion . Always keep a second copy of your important data ( and in different geo places ) . Always think that the worst case scenario is not as far as you hope . Maybe it’s time for an external SSD ( but cost is high for serious capacities ).

( Still don’t have a clue why the filesystem had trouble handling over 2 hundred thousand files ( am I missing something ??) under my xampp directory – disk 2 ( the that for now I promoted to my disk 1 for now ) had also trouble giving enough performance writing to it but it was something that I could live with it . Xampp was used mainly for debugging joomla installations that was already backed up from original sites by this wonderfull module ( Akeeba ) and I deleted and set up a new one