Douglas Purdy

All of our data is gone.

All of it.  Photos of our children.  Videos of their performances.  All my music.  All of our movies.  All our documents.  Gone.

This is the sort of thing that may cause you to panic ever so slightly.  I know I did.

Until two weeks ago, I was using a 1TB WD My Book to store all our media and another (actually two 500GB drives setup as a single drive) as a Time Machine backup.

The media drive failed.  I went to Fry’s to get another drive to replace the media drive without turning off Time Machine.  Big mistake.

It turns out that while I was gone, Time Machine kicked in again.  There was too much data on the iMac internal drive (I had move some files onto that drive) and there is too much data on the backup disk.  Time Machine pruned the data on the backup completely.  All my data was gone.  This was just one of those boundary conditions that I should have thought about and didn’t.

When I got back from Fry’s with a wonderful Vantec NexStar NX and some Seagate 1TB  drives, I noticed.  Panic ensued.  As I worked to accept my “digital tabula rasa”  (I quite like that phase — I hope it catches on), I had a thought.  What if the media drive was still good, but the controller (USB/Fireware -> SATA) was the problem?

I quickly ripped up the media drive casing, pulled the drive and put it into the Vantec enclosure.

Guess what?  There was all my data.  A couple hours of copying later, I was back in business.  Crisis averted.

This event has further driven home to me that need for N (N = 3 where I come from) levels of backup.

I am looking into secondary set of backup drives as well as offline backup in the cloud right now.

That said, this Vantec enclosure is excellent.  Very well made.  Clean and operational.  So far, fair trade.