It turns out this hard drive had been used in one of their "always on" media servers, and had nearly 7 years of powered on time where this drive had been used! Some hard drives you buy are fully tested to handle that, and are designed to handle 1,000,000 hours in terms of Mean Time Between Failure (MTTF), but this one was not. This was simply a good brand name performance desktop hard drive, which is fine, but it was at the end of it's life as you can see from the tools used in these pictures below:
Now that we've confirmed a few details about that drive health, it's time to figure out what to do next. First, we ensure we get as much data off that hard drive as possible, then we replace that hard drive and never use it again. In this case, we were lucky and our educated customer was doing things the right way: 1) He was running basic health checkup tools (that we installed) which alerted him to the hard drive problem at a early point in time. These tools run monthly and alerted him at the first sign of issues, instead of after a complete failure. In this case, we were able to pull all data off that hard drive with only a small bit of hassle. There were some hard drive sectors that needed repaired first. After that small repair, and full data copy, we were able to buy and install a new pro NAS hard drive for his server and specific needs. This new hard drive has a much longer 1,000,000 hour MTBF, or nearly 100 years. Now I've never seen a drive need to run that long, but this gives the customer and us peace of mind. 2) Even if we weren't able to recover the data, this customer had a good data backup strategy in place. Now, it wasn't mission critical data, so in his case he runs a weekly and a monthly backup. He had been lax on the weekly backup, but the monthly external drive he backed up to was a good copy. Fortunately, we don't have to go back a month in time, but he would have been ok if we had to, since lots of his files on this drive don't change frequently. At 208 Pro Tech we help our customers ensure they work smart, and become educated, so that the computers and technology in your life work for you in a way that improves your operations. Allowing you to focus on your like and your business efficiency means that we get happy successful customers. Give us a call at 208-960-0027 if we can help with your data backup or system checkup needs. Back in the day, we used to call our computers a “PC”, which stood for Personal Computer.
This term is even more true today, where our computers, laptops, tablets, phones, and other technology have become an integral part of daily life. Your technology is a important tool, and as a result, becomes an intimate and personal set of your information. Since your technology holds lots of important personal information about you, 208 Pro Tech recognizes the need to keep things confidential. We commit to ensuring your data is protected. We commit to helping you with the highest security and knowledge possible in order to keep it that way. Our onsite and in-person support services ensure you have the best personal attention and quality technology service and support possible, in order to keep your business or home running at maximum potential. Be sure to like and follow our page for more updates. In our next update, we will share education and recent learnings regarding recent online shopping scams and other tips such as how valid or invalid online reviews really are. We want to ensure you are educated. Educated customers make great customer partners. No longer is it good enough to simply have an anti-virus or malware program as your defensive weapon to protect you from hackers and bad people. These are good tools, but knowledge and education is more powerful and required. The connected world we live in has propagated many scams and attack methods. Here is one we've seen recently: Customers have called us, only after getting warned online that they had been hacked or their computer had been compromised. Here is a sample picture of the intimidating message you might see:  In this scam, the online warning maybe a real virus or bad person attacking your computer, or it may be a script or virus meant to get the user to call the fake “Microsoft support person” (who is part of the scam). This support person does not work for Microsoft, but pretends to work in order to fix the user’s computer by logging into the machine. They often talk technical terms for as long as 90 minutes in order to overload and wear out the user, who doesn’t understand what is happening other than they are being helped. Then, support person closes the deal by finally asking for the person’s credit card info in order to fix the problem. Overwhelmed and tired, the user gives the credit card to them usually with a exorbitant fee attached ($550 in the fake Microsoft invoice shown below).
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Rob ForsterSharing his 25 years of technical knowledge and a overall passion for the power and productivity of technology in business. Archives
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