[FRIAM] First of 2 questions

[Russell Standish]

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.



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Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders     hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
                      http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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