Ker-plink!

Ker-plink! That was the sound of the hard drive in my Hackintosh that died. While normally I've been a stand up guy about archiving (not to be confused with backups) of data. In this case the blood drained from my face as I walked into the study and heard the noise that everyone dreads to hear. So I jumped into action, tried to find which drive was making the racket (there were 3) verified that indeed it was no longer responding, console was spitting out streams of errors, and all the folders came up empty. I shutdown the Mac, took it out, weighted a few seconds for the platter to spindown (it makes a thunk when it comes to a complete stop). reconnected and restarted.

BIOS reports no drive 3. Hmm. Take it out again, slowly rotate the drive listening closely for grinding noises, nothing. Well this is slightly better than terrible. You see Watson, this disk has fallen for the Sector 0 error, commonly known as the "click of death". The read head tries to find Sector 0, and slides right past it, slamming the head into the spindle. So technically my data is still on the drive, I just have no possible way of getting it off.

Using my years of expertise, I know I can hopefully calibrate Sector 0 by freezing the drive and reading the data before the platter gets too warm. Into the freezer she goes. This hard drive has been sitting there while I order another hard drive and a NAS. I'm taking this opportunity to do something I know I should have done from a long time and formulate a real backup plan.

You see, the Free people came by and installed fibre to the apartment building. They assured me the units would be lit after the new year. Well that was 3 months ago and no fibre yet. My backup scheme sort of hinges on it, because pushing 60GB of data over 800kbit/s (that's 100KB/s) aDSL is mindfuckingly slow.

So the scheme is use the ReadyNAS Duo as the local NAS. And have it push my backups to an offsite point. In my case, Amazon S3. That way I can use the NAS as a local storage pool, torrentclient, and DLNA server. My energy sucking workstation Q6600/HD3870 doesn't have to be running continuously. And if the hard drives die in the next year or 2 (the dead drive lasted 3 years) I can restore the data using 100Mbit/s fibre.

If it sounds good to you, it sounds good to me.