Firmware Update Takes Seagate Users from Bad to Worse
Sunday, January 25th, 2009I saw on Slashdot that “The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums… that the updater (to fix random drive failures) updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people’s backups if they were on the same type of drive.”
RAID isn’t backup. Backing up your datastore to an identical drive type isn’t backup either.Recovery is the goal and a few guideline principles help ensure that your backups will enable this.Because backup isn’t for data storage it’s about recovering it.
You’ve got to feel sorry for owners of a 500G Seagate Barracuda drive (model 3500320AS) today.The firmware update for the Seagate Barracuda Model 3500320AS was intended to fix a reliability issue..except the firmware update kills the drives which makes a bad situation a miserable one.And your now in a bad place with only two possible choices.It’s either wait and hope or get new (different) hardware and restore from backup.
It’s not a pretty choice.And if you are in this situation what will you do? Do you have a quality backup?
Basic Backup Principles
a) Keep Offsite backups
b) Backup to a different storage type
c) Regularily back up your data
d) Store more than one backup
e) Keep your backups safe and secure
Even if you think you have good backup you need to review the basics and make sure you won’t lose any data.Here’s how I handle both my home and business backup.I use an online backup.It’s inexpensive but has powerful 256bit AES encryption, versioned, and offsite.
It even mounts my online backup space as a network drive and uses just one account for my Linux, Windows, and OSX computers.This adds simplicity.Since all computers will fail at some point keeping it simple makes recovery faster and easier. Simple helps you make sure your backups happen on a regular basis so that when your systems do unexpectedly fail you can get going again with a minimum of effort.