[Macworld]

Post your comments for Mac troubleshooting: dealing with hard drive woes here

[jhorvatic]

Desktops would be harder to replace a drive on like the iMac then Apple's portables.
The old Black and white MacBooks are easy to open. The latest Macbook Pro's are easy also. Requires a small phillips screw driver. The latest Retina Macbook Pro and Macbook Air you'll need a tri-lobe driver which you can obtain from a great website macfixit.com which also can show you with instructions on how to replace that hard drive. Keep in mind that if you replace the drive yourself it won't be covered by Apple's warranty. If you are still in warranty, get it to an Apple store because they can replace it for free and your warranty won't be effected that way. If you're out of warranty then no problem, and you could upgrade the storage capacity or even put in an SSD drive.

[PaulDuncan]

To protect your data you can use totally free Disk Drills (http://www.cleverfiles.com) feature - Recovery Vault. Recovery Vault helps you recover everything in HFS/HFS+ partitions exactly as it was there before. So, you don't have to pay at all.

[whitedog]

The best protection from hard drive failure is a bootable clone backup. A Time Machine backup is somewhat less useful in emergency situations because you cannot boot from it. You may be able to restore from Time Machine to an external drive using Recovery HD, though it will be time consuming - and that assumes that your computer's internal hard drive hasn't suffered catastrophic mechanical failure. In that case your Recovery HD partition will not be available. You may still be able to restore from Time Machine to an external drive using Internet Recovery - if you have a recent Mac (2011 or later), but that will be even more time consuming. If you keep your cloned backup up-to-date, you can get back to work again in a matter of minutes. What's more, if you do have to replace the internal hard drive in your computer, you will have a copy of your boot drive to restore from after you get the old drive replaced. As for replacing your drive under warrantee, a corollary to Murphy's Law says that most hard drive failures occur the day after your Apple Care warrantee expires. One more thing, you should run Disk Utility from time to time on your backup drive to make sure it's in good condition.

There are any number of backup strategies. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Time Machine is the easiest to do - you just set it and forget it. But it is not as helpful in emergency situations as a cloned backup. The most thorough method is to keep a duplicate backup off site in case something drastic happens and your computer and local backups are compromised. The only thing you should absolutely not do is fail to backup altogether. Such a strategy is begging for trouble.

Backups can take from little or no time (with Time Machine) or somewhat longer for cloned backups. The amount of time it takes to recover from hard drive failure is in inverse proportion to the amount of time you spend backing up. You can take that to the bank.

[schoonerman]

Now that you've been convinced you need a bootable clone backup, remember that one backup is not enough.

Why? Because if you need to boot from that clone, you're down to one good copy of your data. And: one copy is not enough.

[amandasmith]

Yes, Disk Drill really does it job!

[romad]

Quote

Now that you've been convinced you need a bootable clone backup, remember that one backup is not enough. Why? Because if you need to boot from that clone, you're down to one good copy of your data. And: one copy is not enough.

Which is why I use BOTH Time Machine AND Carbon Copy Cloner.

[HappinessPays]

Are we on a hard drive fetish at MacWorld this week? This is the second article posted on the topic this week (I'm not complaining, it just seems kind of an odd coincidence)

Personally, I don't think the advice to essentially dump the drive is particularly good. We use a product called Scannerz to test drives and it detected a really, really bad set of sectors on the tail end of a drive. We did a SMART analysis on it using smartmontools, and it essentially told us the drive was on it's last legs. What we did was partition about the last 3GB of the drive out, and the drive has been working well ever since. That, by the way, was over three years ago.

Would I trust it for anything of importance? No. We put it in what we call a "combat unit." These are essentially systems that are old and really good only used for stuff like e-mail, doing reports, etc. etc. They're too slow for todays use, but they're not useless.

Interestingly enough, the guys that make Scannerz recently started a blog (I guess it's a blog) with how-to articles. The topics?

1. How to clone your hard drive with disk utility
2. How to identify performance problems in Mountain Lion with Activity Monitor.
3. How to use Scannerz and Scannerz Lite.

Now you KNEW a company just had to put a plug in there for themselves (item 3). We use Scannerz for hardware testing and Disk Warrior for indexing problems. I find it interesting the companies making them seem to be the only two products on the market that apparently have full support for Core Storage. As an FYI, If we need SMART monitoring, smartmontools is the way to go, but it's not for novices.

[HappinessPays]

Another comment that I forgot to mention from the previous post is this:

If you make a USB flash drive copy of the OS to create an emergency disk, make sure you disable Spotlight indexing on it. I created one such beast, and there was space enough on it to allow me to also use it to transfer files to it other machines, so I did so. When I did so, I didn't disable Spotlight on it.

Guess what? A USB flash drive is NOT an SSD, and from what I can tell, Spotlight kicked on any time I plugged it into a system and indexed the H*ll out of it, eventually rendering it a read-only device. So much for 30 buck flash drive!

Just thought I'd throw that in as a precaution.

[ChipMcK]

the article “Mac troubleshooting: Be prepared for hard-drive failure” should be updated to reflect Lion versus Mountain Lion differences