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Comment by lawgimenez | Hacker News Reader

Yes I bought a new WD 1TB a year ago and one day it was damaged beyond repair. I did not do anything with it. Shop technician's diagnosis was "several tiny scratches on the disk". Not sure what that meant, I assume the whole build of the drive is just bad?

I just lost a 4 years worth of my kid's videos. I will never forgive WD.

Edit: I just forgot to add that my old WD HD (bought around 2009-ish) is still working. But reading the contents will take hours. But the point is the quality of WD has gone downhill.

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>I just lost a 4 years worth of my kid's videos. I will never forgive WD.

I'm sorry, but your fate was sealed the moment you decided that one copy was sufficient. Drives can fail randomly, so keeping valuable data on one without redundancy will virtually guarantee that you will lose data at some point in time. Just be thankful that you learned your lesson and it only cost 4 years worth of videos. If it happened 3 years down the line it could easily have been 7 years worth of videos.

Drives exist in 3 states. About to die, dead and on fire. Plan accordingly.

Just stored 7 years worth of memories in the cloud, they can worry about redundancy!

Ha! I am on iCloud Family max plan and I feel like it will get full 5 years from now.

Different failure mode. Try not to get locked out by Apple. Consider a local copy as well, hard drives are really cheap.

+1. Cloud is ok as a mirror, not as the main copy.

Yeah hard lesson learned indeed. I am slowly working on redundancy with my data, so looking to HN for solutions.

I would strongly recommend signing up for either Backblaze, or using something like iCloud Photos or Google Photos.

My entire 100,000 photos, 20 year library is now in iCloud photos. It's constantly synced and backed up to icloud. Then I have it pulled down in full to a mac that then backs up to backblaze.

Lots of ways to do it, but thats one. :)

For $5-10/month you can get unlimited backup from a machine with Backblaze including your external drives.

Thanks, I am also on iCloud but nearing its limit since I am on iCloud's family plan. I was wondering how did you pull everything to your mac?

You can just add more storage. Of course you could violate TOS and lose access, so still you need to store them in multiple different places.

You should never trust valuable data to a single HD; always make backups.

Personally, I use a portable HD (spinning rust kind, not SSD) to do regular backups of my PC, but the portable HD itself is also backed up onto another portable HD.

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