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rayegunn · 3 years

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PSA - Check the health of your hard drives

I just got done dealing with my very sick computer, a failing hard drive, causing repeated 'unexpected store exception' BSODs and frequent freezes. I actually had 2 bad drives, it turned out, though one was only in the early stages of failure with a number of bad sectors, but still overall working OKish, the other one was so far gone it caused a S.M.A.R.T failure, which is prompted me to look at all the drives, because that showed up at the boot screen. And it could not even be detected properly by the disk analysis software

The one that really failed, E, was where i dumped my movie files, so on the one hand, at least it was not holding anything irreplaceable, no family photos, or artwork, etc. But on the other hand, it also wasn't being backed up, for precisely that reason, since i was a little short on backup space. Besides the boot drive (a SSD, and not really meant to hold much besides the OS and program files, except games which went on D) i had 3 2TB drives, and only one was in good shape. It was the internal backup drive, which is something everyone should have for just such an occasion, the contents of my main drive were being copied to it. So, you know, at least all my STUFF was safe, i had 2 current copies of everything important, and I do also keep copies of some especially important files on the cloud, but i do not pay for extra space, so it doesn't hold enough for everything. But the movies were not being backed up, and stuff going on to E was at high risk of getting corrupted. So i likely have some corrupted movie files. But I selected some favorites that were not available on streaming here, and backed those up, and we can sort out later which are good and which are bad. So, got to work uninstalling/deleting unnecessary things. Mainly games on Steam, since those could easily be reinstalled, except the super-modded beasts like, well, all of Bethesda's games, and the Sims 3 and 4, which just... live permanently on my computer even if i haven't played them in a while, because reinstalling all those mods would be a HUGE pain. (I am a mod addict, please help)

It is at this point i have to plug the backup software I use, it saved my ass. It's called SyncBackFree, and as the name implies, it is a completely free backup program. What I love about it is that unlike SOME backup software, it has an option to mirror, so if i delete something on the source, it will also get deleted on the backup, so you don't end up with a continual buildup of unneeded clutter files that got deleted ages ago on the source drive. It also has a scheduling system (though admittedly one that is not very intuitive to use) that will keep things backed up continually without you having to actively remember to do it. And restoring from the backups is as simple as hitting 'restore', and you can pause at any time, if needed, during those big jobs. I highly recommend it, it may save your ass too: https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

So because i was already using that, mostly i just made sure everything was backing up as it should, and did current runs on the ones that backed up infrequently. (some folders get backed up every few days because they get changed frequently, others only every couple months because they rarely change) The games especially, since that one changes a lot, and i created a temporary profile to backup at least some of the movies, and the entirety of the C drive, (what could be backed up anyway, some C drive system files are blocked) because i was considering my options as I was doing this. And, on my dad's recommendation, i decided to replace the boot drive as well. It was still good, but it was a bit small, and getting old, it was already a second hand drive when i got it, so.... And I decided to get a single 4TB drive to replace the 2 failing 2 TB hard drives. I probably could have gone with 3TB,because it wasn't like i had either one all the way full, not even close, but, for some bizarre reason, the 4TB was cheaper than the 3TB on Amazon, so... may as well. Ordered the drives, and as i waited for them, created an external backup of my backup, just to be extra safe (I had one, but it was old, so updated it) The new drives arrived the other day, and so plugged them all in, after copying the C drive, and now I am using SyncBack to restore all my stuff from the backup drive. And my computer is doing good again, though I have a lot of games to reinstall, even games that have all the files there (as mentioned, i did not uninstall the games that were heavily modded) are not being registered by Steam, so... yeah, gotta reinstall them all. But at least that is pretty easy with Steam. My plan for the backup, now that I have a source drive twice as large as the backup drive, is to back up C to D, and D to F (E is now gone, i could rename them, but the backup software is all set up to work with F, so meh, whatever, it works) and just be really selective with which games and movies get backed up, and the 2 TB backup should be ok.

One thing I found surprising though was how much faster and smoother my computer runs without the bad drive in there. It's remarkable how a bad drive you're not even actively using as anything but a media dump can gum up the works that badly. And like, it sneaks up on you, as the drive goes from just.... a little bad, to outright failing, so you don't realize it's happening, until it gets really bad, and your computer begins crashing, and it just decides to freeze for like 20 seconds at random intervals. But, at least it was just a media drive, and if anything is corrupted, it's probably files that are not irreplaceable, so there's that. Anyway, this has been a PSA to check the health of your hard drives. I should have caught this much sooner, but i had not been checking the health of the drives.

#computer #hard drive #tech

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