Story: Hardware monitoring is critical! Unique files will save me! (I hope)
Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2023 4:02 pm
My story: I am just starting to scan my mess of old USB drives. I first scanned 4 and then added three more and everything seemed fine. When the computer went to sleep and wouldn't resume, I shut it down, disconnected the drives and restarted.
Hard Disk Sentinel always pops up when I start my computer. I usually close it. This time, it was open while I reconnected the USB drive.
SHOCK: One 5TB drive turned the screen red and announced 5% health!
Panic: OMG! I don't have 5TB of free space! What am I going to do?! Will this drive last long enough for me to dedupe 5TB of space?! Hopefully there's a second copy of everything on it because I try to have two backups (and my problem is that I have too many copies). But do I? This is my newest drive, so I could have some unique files on there.
Relief: Oh ya, Duplicate Cleaner has a unique files tab.
Panic: Where's the unique files tab? It's gone in version 5?! (I just upgraded to it.)
Read the manual: Oh, I have to select "Find Remaining" for that drive on the Locations tab. Ok, calm, let's try this.
Rescan disks: I need to connect all 7 disks again and re-scan. This shouldn't take too long because thankfully version 5 remembers the previous scans. (Good to save them too!) Hopefully any unique files fit on my empty 1TB drive.
Current status: Scanning....
KEY MESSAGE: Always have a hard disk monitor running and watch it! Especially when connecting drives that haven't been connected for a long time.
Hard Disk Sentinel always pops up when I start my computer. I usually close it. This time, it was open while I reconnected the USB drive.
SHOCK: One 5TB drive turned the screen red and announced 5% health!
Panic: OMG! I don't have 5TB of free space! What am I going to do?! Will this drive last long enough for me to dedupe 5TB of space?! Hopefully there's a second copy of everything on it because I try to have two backups (and my problem is that I have too many copies). But do I? This is my newest drive, so I could have some unique files on there.
Relief: Oh ya, Duplicate Cleaner has a unique files tab.
Panic: Where's the unique files tab? It's gone in version 5?! (I just upgraded to it.)
Read the manual: Oh, I have to select "Find Remaining" for that drive on the Locations tab. Ok, calm, let's try this.
Rescan disks: I need to connect all 7 disks again and re-scan. This shouldn't take too long because thankfully version 5 remembers the previous scans. (Good to save them too!) Hopefully any unique files fit on my empty 1TB drive.
Current status: Scanning....
KEY MESSAGE: Always have a hard disk monitor running and watch it! Especially when connecting drives that haven't been connected for a long time.