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Just found out my backup tape deck was recording over itself for 6 months
I was doing a big corporate job downtown last week and needed to pull some old cable mapping data off my backup setup. Turns out the drive had been quietly looping and overwriting everything since February. I only caught it because I noticed the file dates looked weird when I was scrolling through. Lost all my records from a 12-unit apartment complex I did in March and a couple commercial patches from April. Nobody told me these things don't warn you when they start failing, they just keep running like nothing's wrong. Has anyone else had a backup fail on them without making any noise about it?
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michaelchen7d ago
Dude that is EXACTLY what happened to me! @kevin_dixon you nailed it with the false sense of security thing. I had an old Seagate drive in my basement rig that I was using to keep copies of all my fiber terminations and patch panel labels. The light was green, the motor was humming, the whole nine yards. I went to pull up a wiring map for a job I did last fall and the whole folder was just the same three corrupted files from February repeated over and over. It took me forever to even realize what was going on because nothing looked broken on the surface. Makes me wonder how many other people have dead backups just sitting there blinking at them.
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kevin_dixon7d ago
Oh man, that stings. I feel your pain bro. I once had a backup drive that I thought was doing its job for like a year and a half turns out it was just corrupting files silently the whole time. The worst part is you get that false sense of security cause the light is blinking and the fan is spinning so you think everything's fine. Now I'm paranoid and check my backups manually every few months even though I know I'll probably miss something again. Honestly its like these things are designed to fail in the most sneaky way possible just to mess with you.
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