Hard Disk Encryption

[heartbone]

For personal use I never thought there was much need for it.
But after my third hard drive crash since August 30, I just realized a good use for it.
The other two hard drives were nine and fourteen years old, and it amazes me that they last so long.
But the last one was a Western Digital 500GB My Passport.

As a 100% backup unit, it had been used at most a dozen times over the past few years.
It failed today after making a backup of a girlfriend's system.
I heard the clicking and immediately knew.

It has a three year limited warranty, and I thought it was still under warranty...
until I saw the 08/04/09 date on the $119 receipt.
How the heck do they engineer these things to break so soon after the expiration?

Just today I realized that if it were still under warranty,
for sure I'd not want the drive sent to the repair labs unencrypted.
They probably look forward to getting these to fix and copy the goodies.
I'll have to start installing the disk tools that come with those external hard drives.

[IdeasVacuum]

Keep more backups, on physically seperate media/drives and/or Cloud, then you can simply destroy a failed drive instead of trying to get it rescued (which is normally a far greater cost than the value of the hardware).
I think it's incredible that laptop manufacturers deliver their machines with a backup system that saves to a partition on the same drive - as if that is going to make a jot of difference when the device fails.

[marc_256]

Hello,

After more than one HDD crash,

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtop ... 35&t=53834

I use now 5 external USB HDD, and one local net backup system.
This for be save

marc,

PS: I still have my broken HDD at home, with all my source programs.

My broken HDD was also a WESTERN DIGITAL 500GB !!!!

[skywalk]

Focus more on what is important(your code/photos/creations) and back up daily/hourly/whenever to multiple flash drives in different locations. With flash drives well over 32GB for $20, I struggle to fill them up with my data compressed and/or encrypted.
Backing up entire hard drives(even incrementally) is a waste of time and resources.
Better to re-install O/S from a known clean state.

[tj1010]

I don't get why so many people are encouraging SSD and thumb drives for vital roles. The wear leveling issues are still bad, a cheap SATA magnetic drive still make more sense from a logical/economical/efficiency stand point..

[IdeasVacuum]

Backing up entire hard drives(even incrementally) is a waste of time and resources.

It does make sense - firstly because you do not waste time recovering your system ~it can take hours to re-install the OS and all Apps, and you will never get it back 100% the way you had it before. With a full backup, a simple disk swap (or copy) is all that is required. Also, you can be sure that you have not forgotten an important file/folder.

[skywalk]

The flash drives are throwaway items to be sure. But, ultimately all permanent media has a lifetime and cost of ownership. Multiple flash drives are the way to go for personal stuff. They are quiet, tiny and pennies.

Not sure about linux/mac but windows offers easy system restores from your desired state.
Instead of backing up entire drives, just make an image of your favorite non-bloat setup.
As I said, it does require some up front thought and explicit user specific storage.

I really can't be bothered with hard drives spinning away and processes checking for incremental changes when all I did was read email and write some code. I prefer a 'pay as you go' system. Backup what I want when I feel like it. It helps of course, if you have streamlined that step with a few simple procedures.

[Zach]

This is why I use FlexRAID.

I can't afford to have multiple backups of a multi-terabyte storage system sitting around, so software-based parity calculation is the next best thing.

[luis]

@heartbone

If you are interested in encrypting disk contents, a good solution could be http://www.truecrypt.org/