Backup Advice Before Potential Disaster

Yet again, I've reached a point where I'm sure one of more of my HDD's is on the last days of its life, just now I got a warning message I've never seen before, which told me that one of my HDD's had reported a failure (must be the SMART, but I've had atleast 2 HDD's die prematurely before without ANY warning). The weirdest thing is that the HDD reporting the failure was the one which I was sure WASN'T failing. I came to this conclusion after going through a process of elimination by booting the PC with or without certain HDD's connected and listening for the dreaded buzzing/whirring/clicking/robotic noises for a few hours under different situations (running programs, idling, stress etc).

So now I really need a QUICK and EASY/SIMPLE way of updating my huge archive of backups in a non-confusing way. I have a music folder with easily over 500 tracks, a pictures folder with literally 1000's of pictures and many other extremely huge folders like this which are growing over time. To simply overwrite each entire folder would likely take over 7 hours (we're talking 50+GB's of data, much of which will already BE in my backups), so I need to find a way of ONLY backing up what NEEDS backing up, that way I can shave about 5 hours off the file copy time. The checking criteria can't just be as simple as "same name means no overwrite", it must check the data included in the file with the same name because many of my Photoshop projects & music productions will obviously have the same name they always had, but will be updated as I continued to work on them.

Is there anyway to do this without using extra software, just using windows? I need to do this ASAP because after that warning I don't know how much time I have left. I'm sick to death of HDD's, its like they're built to fail in less than 5 years these days, afterall, the more your gear dies, the more money you have to spend on replacements, all fattening their scamming wallets. Companies like Seagate should be named and shamed for the cheap knockoffs they build.

Thanks to anyone who can give some solid advice here!

 

For any of the folders containing compressible data (Photoshop projects, Ableton projects, raw audio, save files etc) I've zipped them into RARs (saving huge amounts of space) and I update those archives using "add & update" which I assume/hope checks more than just the name of a file when it decides what gets added/updated. I just need a way to do this the contents of standard file folders now.

I just got the warning again, less than 15 mins later, I haven't heard one single clicking/buzzing sound, nothing mechanical at all...

 

Also, a way of finding the "difference" between 2 supposedly identical folders would be EXTREMELY useful. I can't trust my own scrutiny, its obviously too prone to mistakes & oversights. I need a program that tells me "Hey look, you have 2 'chillout' folders but this one contains these 3 files which the other one doesn't". I'm finding too many folders containing 100's or 1000's of files but which have a "difference" of about 5-30 files (basically, impossible to find without help).

Edit: Found SyncBack, going to try that out, it sounds like exactly what I need.

 

Windows doesn't do RARs so what software did you use for this and why can't you use it for your other folders?

 

Thanks for the reply, what I've done is used WinRar to compress any folders that have data that will allow it. EG, I've compressed my Ableton projects from 9+ GBs to a little 3GB RAR for storing as backup.

Right now I'm trying to update the Ableton projects RAR, but the program "seems" to choke to death when I add anything (even on a quad core i5-6500) but the CPU usage for the Winrar process stays at 0% using less than 50mb of RAM. It wants to take 9 hours to add 5 files totalling only 5mb!!! I don't understand, its like the CPU could kick in and help, but it wont. I'm not even using best compression mode, just normal.

 

Okay I figured out the cause of the ultra slow archiving, it was my USB drive. I took it out of the equation then set Winrar's priority to 'realtime' and things are going far far quicker.

 

You've probably sorted it now but in case not you can set the WinRAR backup mode to Add and Update. That will skip any files which already exist in the archive. For files in native format the simplest way to backup only files which have been changed or are new is to use a sync program such as SyncBack Free. You can't do that in Windows AFAIK.

 

Thanks, yea I've been updating my RARs using "add & update" and I've been using SyncBack Free too, very useful program once I understood the interface.

Most of my datas backed now anyway, so its time to search for a HDD made by a company that builds things to last... Seagate should be liquidated, Western Digital has conflicting views, so does Samsung (my Samsung SSD works fine still, touch wood), can't remember what Maxtors reputation for "lifespan" is, same with Toshiba. Its too hard to know which company can be trusted these days, I guess whoever you invest in, you're taking a gamble!

 

Shuriken...

Take a look at this:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives

and this:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives

I started going with Hitachi or Western Digital since I read the above. I have more confidence now that I have made the change, given I was using almost exclusively Seagates before. Also, I recommend downloading and running Hard Drive Sentinel here at Major Geeks:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/hard_disk_sentinel.html

This program is loads of peace of mind. It's a quite sophisticated monitoring tool that alerts you if one of your drives is underperforming. Also, it shows you your drive temps in the system tray and gives you easy access to SMART data. It also predicts how many days of life are left in each of your drives...

 

AtlBo

Thanks for suggesting Sentinel, it sounds like a very handy tool to have! For disposable mass backup I picked up a Samsunb M3 2TB external but I was shocked when I discovered the actual drive itself is made by the dreaded Seagate... I "like" how the sneaky buggers hide that fact until after you've unboxed and read the small print. Now I'm hoping my Samsung Evo8 isn't also secretly made by Seagate too!

Anyway thanks all, my backups are sorted now, just thought I'd pop back to make sure I hadn't missed anything!

 

Shuriken UK...

No problem. If you get a chance I definitely recommend taking a look at HDS. I have it on 5 PCs.

I really like that it doesn't use any resources hardly that I can see. There is only one pop up during boot for the free version to put up with, but I think of it as a boot reminder to take a look at everything. I mean HD Sentinel does alert you to problems (seriously) which is loads of relief. HDs can go from seemingly perfect to 20% health very quickly. That's why I like to take a look sometimes. Kind of like seeing the boot time on each boot.

Surprised Samsung has a deal with Seagate. I think I know someone sho uses a similar type of deal, and he has been very happy with it.

Good luck with it all...

 

Seagate has owned Samsung since 2011
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/20/2648216/seagate-samsung-hdd-deal-complete

You might be interested in hd failure rates through June of this year
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...-releases-updated-hard-drive-reliability-data