Folks, ALWAYS back up your data!
 

Otherwise I would not be in a good mood tonight.

I just had a brand new 1TB hard drive (in service for exactly a week) just die on me. :eek: I had copied all the home movie captures for my DVD project to the drive, about 20+ hours of video. One thing I did not do is get around to deleting the files off of my original hard drive... so I had a backup of everything I would have lost off that new hard drive. I dodged a big bullet on this one. FOLKS, BACK UP YOUR DATA! Less tears in the end, guaranteed.

For those that are wondering, its a Western Digital 1TB Black edition with 64MB of cache (model # WD1002FAEX). I am going to attempt to return the drive to Microcenter and get a drive from another brand, anyone here familiar with their return policy on bare drives? So far the reviews aren't looking so hot on this drive, one of the reasons I bought locally is that I have seen how poorly online vendors have been shipping OEM drives. Remember when WD used to ship single bare drives in their own brown box with those foam inserts? I might have had great luck through the years, but this is the first hard drive I have ever bought that has completely failed this quickly. Thankfully it died now, would've really sucked if it happened further along in this project.

I need to write my article on backup policy. Even many companies, schools/colleges and governments tend to botch this one up. (A friend of a friend works for the federal government in DC, and he's waiting on what I have to say. When he told me their method for archiving and backing up data, I was dumbfounded. Everybody is afraid of terrorists, but they're endangering our data pretty well on their own, by way of cheap USB2 hard disks and cheap DVD-R.)

It doesn't have to be expensive or complicated, even -- just well thought out.

Well drive has been swapped out. Hopefully this one works out.