Hard drive backups

[bob p]

I do really like the remote management idea. But I cant think of a suitable remote location in my house -- a garage or an attic don't work for me because they'd be subject to 100-degree seasonal temperature swings. My only other option is a corner in the basement, and that's always accessible enough that I could walk over to a box and kick it if I had to. That said, remote management would be a very cool feature to have -- just to indulge the techie in me.

[Steve A.]

The program in windows XP from good ole DOS days days still works. What is neat about this command line is only the changed data is updated into there appropriate folders at a click, no need to worry on what goes where.

xcopy c:\lyrics g:\basement\lyrics /d/e/c/h/k/y This example lyrics is the source on C and G drive is the external hard drive, basement is the folder that refers to the basement PC (Mine)\lyrics is the destination folder. The /d/e/c/h/k/y are the switched that take care of the updating status. Write the command in note pad, save the file in a handy place, as long as the DOS file names on the directory matches xcopy will work.

I used to use xcopy a lot- and xxcopy as well. The DOS file names I remember were strictly in a 8+3 format, with no spaces. So how do modern Windows filenames work with xcopy? Are spaces converted to %20?

Thanks!

Steve Ahola

[R.G.]

Seagate Freeagent: Worse than Useless!

I had an interesting thing happen recently, and it's only now coming to a conclusion suitable for public consumption.

I have/had a Seagate Freeagent external drive, which was intended for some backup duty until the servers get tested out - or, probably, I get tested out on working them. As noted earlier, a backup you can't back up from is worthless.

The Freeagent, a 1.5TB model two months old, just ... quit responding. Too busy counting its toes over and over to tell me what I'd stored in there. I was sure I'd done something wrong, so I gave it the usual full afternoon of messing about to figure out what was going on. Nothing worked.

I decided that since it was practically new, I'd use that neato warranty from Seagate. "No problem!" said the virtual Seagate-person through the net. "Here's your RMA number and thanks for using Seagate." I was pleased.

I even found some of the gotchas in the fine print about having to either use the original packaging or packaging with at least two inches of plastic foam in all directions around the drive for return shipping. Bad packaging voids the warranty, you see. Specifically forbidden are peanuts, bubble wrap, practically any normal packing material except plastic foam. Got it. Plastic foam it is, and was. Off to "Seagate", which turns out to actually be a "Joe's Global Services" at MacAllen Texas, on the Mexican border.

You can guess the rest. "Joe's" is a shop where they are given raises for figuring out how to make the percentage of "warranty void" be higher. I got my unrepaired drive back with no indication of what was what, and not working, as it had left here. My phone call to Seagate started politely enough, until I was told the warranty was void because the drive had been opened. I'd never opened it. There were some scratches on the cover. Proof enough not to look. The Seagate rep informed me he was from New York, and therefore frank. He believed I'd opened the box from my tone of voice. Thanks very much, goodbye. He never heard my response.

This particular tale is brought to you from an unhappy customer. Do YOU have your data on a Seagate Freeagent, with no other redundancy?

Maybe you oughta rethink that.

It reaffirms my choices in going to a self checking/scrubbing setup for backup disks, at least to me.

And relearning this only cost me another hundred bucks.

You figure out any morals from the story.

[bob p]

Wow. If Seagate is refusing to honor valid warranty claims on their drives, then they must be trying to avoid paying out on them because the number of valid claims is killing them.

I have heard that Seagate had HUGE problems with defective firmware on the entire 7200.12 series of drives. The firmware problem was causing drives to fail left and right -- if you look at the reviews on NewEgg and Tiger, it seems that somewhere around 20% of the reviews give the lowest possible rating, citing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome as the problem. A HUGE percentage of the drives arrived DOA upon shipping, and a significant number failed within a few months of deployment.

As I understand it, having read the NewEgg, TigerDirect and Seagate forums, the drives shipped with defective firmware, and the firmware was the root of the problem. There was a very high rate of warranty returns on those drives -- so high that I think Seagate's profits will be effected. Once the firmware problem got corrected, Seagate offered a downloadable firmware upgrade for customers. Then a little later TigerDirect blew out the remaining inventory of drives with a $30 rebate.

I ended up buying one of the 1.5 TB 7200.12 drives from Tiger on the rebate program, not knowing any better. With free shipping, a $30 rebate, and a $10 gift card, the drive ended up costing me about $60. It seemed like a good deal, but needless to say I wasn't aware of the plethora of bad reviews until after the drive got delivered. Now that I owned the drive, all of the bad reviews had me worried... the drives were notorious for clicking and ticking just before they died, and my drive started making the clicking / ticking noises as soon as I hooked up the SATA cable and started installing LVM. Uh oh...

Luckily the clicking and ticking stopped as soon as I put ext3 on the drive. I guess the drive just wasn't happy not having a file system on it.

I think that Seagate took a HUGE financial hit on the 7200.12 series of drives. Essentially, the firmware problem resulted in a 100% predicted failure rate on the entire model line. People started talking about Class Action lawsuits. The warranty claims could be so expensive that they could eliminate all of Seagate's profits and push them into bankruptcy.

Now back to how you were treated:

I think its BS that Seagate should refuse to honor a warranty claim just because an external drive has a scratch on its plastic case. For Pete's sake, its an EXTERNAL drive -- you'd expect that they make the case out of ABS because they expect that the drive is going to get bumped into and scratched during its lifetime on the desktop. It just doesn't seem fair that an external scratch should void your warranty.

Its interesting that they're accusing you of opening the drive. Let me ask this -- what reason would you have for opening the drive if it were functioning properly? The only reason that anyone would even consider tinkering with one of those devices is because it failed. To me, an attempted opening is evidence that the drive was malfunctioning. They're just trying to accuse someone else of attempting a repair so that they can dodge the warranty claim by claiming that someone else's substandard service caused the problem.

I guess I'd better buy another 1.5 TB drive to make a shadow of the new Seagate that I just bought. Do you think we'll have any better luck with Western Digital? The NewEgg reviews are slamming not only the Seagates, but the WD xx EARS drives too. What's left? Samsung? It seems that everyone's big drives (1 TB and up) are failing prematurely. The external drives have a particularly bad rep for failures. I've steered clear of them.

I hope that you can get this problem resolved. If I were in your shoes I'd definitely be calling back and asking to talk to a manger. If all else fails and you get stuck with a paperweight, consider this: if you've got a 7200.12 in the box, there are firmware updates that users are supposed to apply to the drives before using them. Maybe you could fix the drive with the firmware upgrade.

Good luck.

[Steve A.]

You can guess the rest. "Joe's" is a shop where they are given raises for figuring out how to make the percentage of "warranty void" be higher. I got my unrepaired drive back with no indication of what was what, and not working, as it had left here. My phone call to Seagate started politely enough, until I was told the warranty was void because the drive had been opened. I'd never opened it. There were some scratches on the cover. Proof enough not to look. The Seagate rep informed me he was from New York, and therefore frank. He believed I'd opened the box from my tone of voice. Thanks very much, goodbye. He never heard my response.

R.G. I had one of those horrible customer service experiences with Circuit City. This was maybe 10 years ago and Iomega had come out with one of the first retail CD-R/RW drives with Burn-Proof technology (undoubtedly the worst product name in history). Back then I smoked a few packs of non-filter cigarettes a day and my optical drives would rarely last more than a year so I opted for the extended warranty- something like $39 for the $200 drive.

That drive worked great if I was burning just one or two CD's at a time but I was often cranking out a dozen or more. Quite often in the middle of the burn the drive would lock and would not respond to anything. I didn't feel like dealing with the warranty issue right then so I bought another drive which worked just fine. Maybe a year or two later my son needed a CD-R/RW drive and I remembered the Iomega still covered by the extended warranty. I had shrunk down the invoice and the warranty paper and stuck in on the drive with clear packing tape so I had all of my ducks in a row.

I first drove down to the local Circuit City and looked around for their service dept- it was gone! They gave me an 800 number to call- I think it was someone in New York that I was talking to. This company had nothing to do with Circuit City except for servicing their warranties.

I told him the problem and he went and looked at the Iomega site and found some obscure bulletin that said that if the drive overheated you just had to stop using it until it had a chance to cool down. So this jerk from NY said that my drive was not covered by warranty because that bulletin indicated that it was a normal issue with their drives. I really doubt that bulletin specifically referred to my model but my main point was that I have owned a dozen drives and none of them overheated like that therefore the Iomega drive was defective.

Needless to say I was very upset so I put my double whammy on Circuit City. And we all know how that turned out...


As for your suggestion about turned down warranty claims and recompense, I think that it is more like Seagate dropping the warranty servicer if they approve too many claims. For some reason I don't think that the boss would pay out a bonus to the workers for anything. "You are lucky you have a job, dude!"

Sometimes those stories do have a happy ending- like when Circuit City went out of business. Hooray!

Steve

[Bill Moore]

Steve, here at our shop, my wife and I have separate PC's to run our respective programs. At the house we have another machine with both main programs loaded, and update it weekly from flash drives. Monthly we use portable hard drives and clone each pc's main drive with Casper.
Monday, my machine quit, (would not detect the drive). I brought the one from the house,(already updated with the flash drive), and swapped out the defective machine. Other than a year or so worth of updates to load, the machine had all current information. I took the machine over to the tech with the back up drive, and even if he has to replace the drive, I won't lose any information.

[bob p]

Oh yes ... getting back to the original point of this thread:

High density portable media can make system backups easier than ever. If you're just doing office type work and you need to back up records, then backing up a PC's data can be trivial -- I'd be willing to bet that if you're not looking at backing up audio or video media files, and you're just dealing with the typical workplace work product, you could effectively do data backups using a USB drive that hangs on your keychain.

The situation can get complicated, though, if you're looking at backing up a lot of media files. Those things can place a huge demand on storage requirements.

[R.G.]

Yeah, the original point of the thread.

I don't think Seagate drives are necessarily any worse than WD, or Hitachi, or Samsung (the firmware disaster aside). In fact, those are about the only choices. Fujitsu and Toshiba tend to be laptop. Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Any hard drives you buy will probably be made by one of those.

They will **all** have failures. I'm not hacked that it failed. It happens. I'm hacked at the failure to deal with my issue. I'm angry about the customer service. For the cost of a refurbished replacement Seagate has cost itself my future business.

Further, the realization that they're all going to fail - 100% of all machines, people, animals, stars, planets, and universes, so far as is known, will eventually die - is what led me into redundancy, error check coding, and online scrubbing. The idea is to never be without at least one place to stand. Football realized this with the triple option/wishbone. The only way to shut that down was to put one man per possible ball carrier. Any redundancy left over was effective almost all the time.

My server exploits are focused on having more than one place to stand at any time I have data at risk - which is always.

[bob p]

Thanks for the heads up -- It looks like Tiger has the CMPSU-400CX on sale for $29.99 after a $20 rebate. I need one of these because: a) my old PSU is really old, and b) its got 6 SATA power supply adapters and I don't have any. For the price of a bunch of Molex to SATA adapters I can practically pay for the PSU. This is a no-brainer.

I've had good luck with the rebates from Tiger, so I'm going to order one. Too bad there's a limit of one rebate per customer.