On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 10:09:41PM -0600, Gillian Densmore wrote: > My backups are at 1 infinite loops drive aka google drive, for stuff that I > literally can't replace I keep their, and on a nice USB drive WD passport I > got. a few years ago. > What causes SSD to just die? is that a limitation of of read/writes as > compared to hours of use (SATA)?
ISTM, cell errors occur all the time, transistors stop working, maybe zapped by cosmic rays, or whatever. For a while, redundancy keeps the whole thing working - error correction algorithms fix failed bits, sometimes with a message in the system log about the fix, then some errors fail to be fixed, which leads to data being corrupted, and then finally the OS fails to mount the drive. I've had some success where the drive was a boot drive and the error was in system libraries prevented the drive from booting, but could be taken out and mounted in another system, enabling extracting the data. Even if the drive cannot be mounted, one can often extract the data on the system by skipping over the bad blocks. But it is very time-consuming, so only worthwhile if the data is a) very valuable, b) no backups exist elsewhere and c) plain text, as you will need to pour through reams of gibberish, looking for the bit of plain text data of interest. Actually, now I remember, there is some software that sniffs out common file types, eg images. I had to do that once when I lost nearly a month's worth of photos of my wife's due to a fat-fingered command typed in the wrong directory. It required sifting through around 100,000 images, looking for the photos in question. I got quite good at doing this efficiently, but it still took about 3 weeks of fairly sustained activity. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/