Almost lost 2 years of photos when my backup drive died

My external hard drive started making clicking noises last Tuesday and I nearly had a heart attack. I had been lazy about the 3-2-1 backup rule and only kept one copy of everything on that drive. Turned out the controller board failed, not the platters themselves. I found a local shop in Portland that swapped the board for $80 and recovered all my data. Never again, I'm setting up automatic cloud backups tonight. Has anyone else had a close call with drive failure like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan_perez3d ago

Portland seems hit or miss for drive repair honestly. I had a guy there who wanted $200 to just clone a dying drive, and he couldn't even do it. $80 is almost too cheap, makes me wonder if he cut corners or just got lucky with the board swap. Cloud backups are fine for some things but I've been burned by slow upload speeds and monthly fees that add up fast. I just buy two cheap external drives and swap them every few months now, one at my buddy's place across town. Feels more solid than trusting some company to keep my photos safe.

the_mason3d ago

Man I felt that clicking noise description in my soul. My old Seagate did the exact same thing at 2AM on a Tuesday and I swear my heart stopped for a solid 10 seconds. $80 is a steal though, the place near me wanted $300 just to look at it. You got lucky it was just the controller board, most of the time when they start clicking it means the read/write heads are literally scraping the platters. Did you go with Backblaze or one of the other cloud services? I'm trying to decide which one won't make me rage every month when I see the bill.