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computer talk: hard drives and backup.
2015-03-18 @ 8:17 a.m.
this will be a computery/techie entry about hard drives and preserving your data, so if you don't care then don't bother reading it. but i want to discuss what happened with me and my computer just in case it happens again or someone who randomly reads this has it happen to them. so the other day i was super excited about receiving my new solid state drive in the mail. it came, i unboxed it, and it was/is beautiful. i don't think that i mentioned this the other day, but it ended up being $185 for a 500gb drive, which i used to replace my primary hard drive 1:1. (if you ever consider swapping your hard drive to a solid state, you will find a LOT of info about what to do if your destination drive [the SSD] is smaller than the hard drive you're starting from.) as i mentioned the other day, i uploaded all of my vital, essential files to amzn's vault and felt very secure that i had at least have one copy of these things somewhere. then, it was time to back up my hard drive in a usable state. it's cool to have your files backed up, but if you've ever had a computer crash that you've had to restore, you know how absolutely soul-draining it is to try to reinstall windows, then try to get your settings and all back to the way they were, go through all the updates again, etc., and THEN finally get to the point where you can transfer your stuff back. after going through that shit countless times in my life, i finally learned my lesson. now, my computer has two hard drives. one of them is the primary one that windows runs from, and the other is just an extra overflow drive which i use for recovery and computer backups. it too is 500gb. so, usually when i back up my computer i take an image of it, which is pretty much a snapshot of the system, its files, settings, etc exactly as they were at the time the image was made. i save this to the second hard drive because 1. it is rarely accessed so probably not as overworked as the first one, and 2. because the image is the exact size of my main drive, like 300gb, i can't fit it on my main one. and why the hell would you put your backup in the same place as the stuff you're trying to back up? common sense. since last summer or so, all of my full system backups (combined "backup" + hard drive image) started failing. i kept being lazy about fixing it though, because i would go into the settings and tool around, and since it would take several hours to start and make it partially through the process, if the problem didn't resolve itself then i was kind of like, meh, i'll come back to it later because this has already been a huge time investment. but then of course, i never came back to it. until maybe a month ago(?), i got my first blue screen. the only ones i previously had on this computer were from me doing stupid shit, like attaching a weird unrecognized device, or changing some kind of setting i had no business changing. but this one was out of nowhere, and it was a KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR. it said if it's your first time seeing the error, then restart and do some things, but i was like "whatever, this IS my first time seeing this error so it's probably no big deal and i'll go on about my business." the second time i saw the error a week or so after that, i was like hmm. but i will ignore this again, i probably just did something. but then it happened AGAIN. that was the point at which i decided that i probably needed to get a new hard drive. some forum for [brand] computers said that you should expect your hard drive to last only about 6-8 years, and i was very much in that range, so i made the purchase. and meanwhile, my games were running super laggy, youtube videos would be choppy, the internet seemed to be way slower on my computer than even on my phone. but i just figured that we had a crappy internet connection. and i would search "[game title] extreme lag" on the forums and there would be tons of people experiencing exactly what i was experiencing, so i didn't find this behavior particularly unusual. i should have thought to myself, hmm. i seem to be having a lot of problems lately. could it be that these problems were a result of my hard drive failing? but for some reason i just assumed they were all isolated incidents. they weren't. so anyway. once the SSD arrived last week, i redoubled my efforts to make a full backup + image of my hard drive just in case something happened while i had my computer open. JUST IN CASE. so i run the windows backup program, and it fails. i tried to run it again, and it failed again. i changed a number of settings, and nothing that i did would make it work! okay?? then i downloaded all of these various disk cloning programs. ran each one. each run taking hours. and each of them FAILING! what the fucking shit. after several days of this, i started getting super frustrated. i didn't want to open my laptop before having a successful backup in case i damaged the drive while taking it out, but why the fuck weren't they working!? luckily, my computer threw up the same blue screen DURING an attempted backup, so this time i actually read and wrote down what it said. the first suggestion was that the hard drive has errors and that you should run chkdsk. after that, it suggested failing memory, and a few other things. i know that chkdsk takes forever to run, AND if for some reason it is interrupted it can possibly really fuck your shit up, so i was like meh, i'll go back to that one once i have a backup. i attempted to backup with some alternate software suggestions posted on some forums, and again, nothing worked! but FINALLY, the last program that was suggested, macrium reflect, included specific error numbers (the other ones would just say "clone/image failed" or whatever, and close). so i looked it up, tried 3 or 4 suggestions that didn't work, and found myself back at one thing: run chkdsk. i realized that i had no choice, so i ran it. my disk had many errors and bad sectors, and was apparently failing rapidly! so once chkdsk scanned and repaired successfully, i opened macrium to try to simply clone my hard drive to the SSD, but that wouldn't work, so FINALLY this program successfully made an image of the disk (i tried the other programs when the clone failed but nothing worked but macrium. most programs can't clone disks with too many errors.)!!! i immediately saved it in multiple locations (again, taking hours since it was a 300gb file), connected the SSD via USB and used macrium to restore the image TO the SSD (avoiding having to reinstall windows, etc), and it WORKED!!! i was so fucking excited. a really obnoxious number of hours had so far been lost to this because i am an asshole and should have run chkdsk way earlier, so i was finally doing what i thought i would be doing last week. i replaced the drive and booted up, getting an error that windows was unable to start. sigh. so i ran startup repair, which took about an hour to run, and it said that it could not repair the errors at this time, but i was welcome to send an error report, which could not be sent at this time. hah. i let the system restart, and suddenly ... windows is loading? super fast?? i get to the login screen and there's my face! i entered my password and noticed that i had a few errors and weird driver issues, but once i resolved everything, my computer has been working perfectly, and so, so fast. this was the best upgrade i could have done for this machine. it should last me another several years, especially after i upgrade the memory next and clean out the inside which i am sure is full of fur and dust. SO tl; dr: back up your important files, and back them up often, in locations other than where the files themselves are located. if you give any fucks about your important files, you will do this regularly, and before you get to a danger zone with your hard drive. if your hard drive is pretty old and used regularly, you should count on replacing it soon. SSDs are awesome but not necessary for everyone, but can be a cheap way to gain a major speed upgrade if you game or do graphic design a lot. if your hard drive starts doing weird things, like giving you blue screens or making funny sounds or running WAY slower than you remember, back up your important files, and just suck it up and google the goddamned error and take the time to fix it before you get to the danger zone. even if you don't know how to fix the error and your computer eventually crashes, you'll have a backup of your important files so you don't cry yourself to sleep at night thinking of everything you lost. and finally, if you do get to the danger zone (or are at least toeing the line), macrium reflect was the only program that was able to successfully complete a backup of my failing drive. THEN it managed to restore that backup, perfectly, first try. now that i have everything functional again, i checked the settings and will set the program to do scheduled backups for me, sending them to the second hard drive. i'm not even going to mess around with windows' backup anymore. whew! okay! hopefully one day this information will help someone else who is having problems like this. bye. |