I have several back up methods for a lot of things. but I don't keep up with them all the time.

Just had a hard drive start to eat itself. getting CRC check errors on everything.

I did a back up on all of it back in april thinking I was good.

it is an old drive. still pata, so it has gone through several machines. I am sure it is well over 5 years or older. probably closer to 10.
but it had been doing so well I had just started to trust it rather than treat it as a wear item.

I can let it cool off and fire it up and copy about 1 or 2 gb of data off before it shows as an unformated drive.
so I am slowly pulling important stuff off.

email first(I had redirected off c knowing that if I lost the os, I would sitll have mail).
then image back up's.
now some non-esential's that are just nice to have and not have to download again.

do regular back ups and you don't have this problem, or at least you minimize your loss.

at least I am down to the nice to have stuff, so if it completly eats itself, I am ok now.

I now have toysync 2 set up to copy email off to another drive plus my nas every day, instead of thinking the drive was gtg after running for so long.

had a lot of older drives fail this year. probably going to start a PMS on those, after 5 throw it out running good or not.

This is why I started using a NAS and backing it up to AWS.

Losing data sucks balls.

I lost a drive a few weeks ago.



It just decided to turn it self off one night, and that was it. I opened it up, tried to make sure the control arm wasn't stuck, etc, to no avail.



So now I just force myself to make lots of incremental backups. It sucks, but that's all you can do.

"If you can't afford to have backups, you can't afford to have data."

yeah, setting a bunch of automatic stuff now.

it came back this morning like nothing was wrong.
got everything off and will trash it now.

I like the magnets in them. use them on the oil pan and transmission pans on my cars.

Backups are important, and it's also a good idea to make images of your OS drive and individual OS's in case one shits the bed.  It's easier than having to do a complete reinstall of an OS, and all the updates and application reinstalls that go with it.

I've got 4 data drives that back up to 4 backup drives, which back up to 4 external backup drives.  I have images of my OS drive as well as individual OS's. I also pull my Firefox bookmarks off my various machines, merge them, and then put them back on the devices so that all of my bookmarks are backed up and current across all devices.

As for your problem hard drive, pull it from the machine, and put it in the freezer in a Ziploc bag for a couple of days.  Pull from freezer and with it still in the bag, wrap it in a soft-shelled ice pack and connect to another machine with a SATA/PATA to USB connector.  Transfer data.   A couple of years back, I had to pull an OS and data off a failing 80Gb hard drive.  I got about halfway through before it started throwing errors.  Wrapped a new ice pack around the hard drive, the errors stopped, and I was able to copy the rest of the drive.  I had some booting issues after copying, but a quick run through with a Windows repair disk, and the new hard drive was up and running in the machine.

I've had good luck with backblaze online backup.  Ironically while using Easeus to run an image my MBR got corrupted.  Backblaze saved my ass.

Dude, use your Firefox sync, it will do the same with a lot less hassle. Also Pocket is a hell of a program as well for sharing links across devices.



 

It's all scripted, pulling the files off the devices when I do backups, putting the merged file onto the backup drive, and pushing the updated bookmarks file back to the devices. No user intervention required.

Or you could just sign all your devices into Firefox sync.... Sorry, the inner geek in me gets what you are doing, but the functionality is built into FF already.



https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/sync/