Comments on Profile Post by atomicbob

I thought SSD was more reliable then HDD? Im in the middle of converting my mac mini

"more reliable" doesn't mean "never fails."

In other words... you are never not going to need multiple backups!

I live near saltwater. It appears an exceptionally thin layer of oxidation on the SSD PCB edge connector had formed. A simple extraction / reinsertion fixed the problem. It did take awhile to diagnose. Before, boot time was over an hour and shutdown approximately the same.

@Thad E Ginathom is very correct - Acronis True Image and NAS are most welcome friends. Backups running as I type. Only a week's worth of work was at risk. But rebuilding from backups and straightening out all the licenses would have been quite time consuming.

Oh yes... backups save the data, but the work still has to be done.

And this one has been bothering me for decades: should it be backsup, not backups!

"A simple extraction / reinsertion fixed the problem."

Take apart and put back together again. A great fix for technology simple and complex!

I fixed what I think was an hdd preventing the machine from booting that way, only last week. But I am now in that fear-filled zone: might have an impending hdd problem! Yep. Backups.

There aren't enough likes available to your comment on backups!!!!

Here is another thought full of fear. You never know that a backup is ok, until you have successfully restored from it. Yes, I've lived a few hours of fear while tapes read... But who keeps a mirror system and actually tests every backup!

I borked transitioning to a new regime, overwrote my data with an old/degraded backup and nuked a good number of baby photos. Good times.

My home backup regime would be laughable in a professional setting. But I do do it. And I have kept it up fairly strictly since I lost a hdd and /thought/ I had backups of some stuff.

Sorry about your pics. Yes, I learned the hard way too, but as an ex-pro, I was especially shamed and ashamed.

I use cloud services to back up everything - One Drive with MFA enabled. Just save all of my files to the One Drive location and never have to think about it.

iCloud at home and on Phone.

Of course you should backup even if you have SSD. Just more that i thought an HDD was prone to catastrophic failure whereas SSDs grind slowly to a halt as the sectors have a limited number of read/write cycles.

This is why I just gave up and paid for a computing node at my institution's cluster. They maintain it for you and then you don't have to panic.

Acronis True Image and ReadyNAS have yet to fail on me or anyone that took my recommendations and used the combination. Have multiple instances of drive failure with successful restores from backups logged over the last ten years.

During my SSD failure some corruption of BenchVue licensing has occurred which will require attention. This will impact the USB cable measurements update. Other than that, lab computer is running again. SSD appears to be fine, though an overnight run of chkdsk is in order.

After hearing enough ticks of doom I keep everything important on SSDs. Which still do fail, but typically last (wayyy) long enough past their 0 MWI mark that you really should have backed it up.

It does not go by components. Somebody should write a song called "Fifty ways to loose your data!"

My cycle is weekly. Sometimes it stretches to two, but it includes an off-site copy swap. Even if the house burnt down (its been flooded, but I kept the PC dry) I would not loose my entire digital life.