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Everything in the room
Seventeen guides in five sections. No dates, no rankings, nothing for sale.
01How Storage Fails
The modes, and the order events happen in.
- How a Disk Actually FailsRarely all at once. The order of events, and where the warnings appear.
- The Five Failure ModesMechanical, electronic, flash wear, controller, human — and the first response to each.
- Why SSDs Fail DifferentlyWear levelling, write amplification, and a drive that goes read-only without warning.
- What the Noises MeanClicking, ticking, spin-up retries — and why the answer is always to stop.
02Reading the Warnings
What the drive is trying to tell you.
- What SMART Is Really Telling YouThe handful of attributes that matter, and the many that do not.
- Short Test, Long Test, and ScrubsWhat each actually checks, and how often to run them.
- Pending and Reallocated SectorsThe two counters worth setting an alarm on.
- Noticing Before It MattersGetting a machine to tell you, rather than finding out on restore day.
03Backup & Sync
Copies, media, distance, versions.
- How Many Copies Is EnoughThree copies, two media, one off-site — and where almost every setup stops short.
- Sync Is Not BackupA mirror propagates a deletion in seconds. One copy with several windows is still one copy.
- RAID Is Uptime, Not HistoryWhat redundancy buys, and the four things it does not survive.
- Versions, Retention and the Bad TuesdayHow far back you can actually go, and why that is the real question.
- An Untested Backup Is a HypothesisThe one afternoon a year that turns a hope into a fact.
04Recovery
Stop writing, image first, work from the copy.
- The First Thing to Do When a Drive Starts ClickingStop writing. Image first. Work from the copy. In that order, every time.
- Imaging a Failing DriveWhy you copy the whole thing before you try to read any of it.
- When to Stop and Pay SomebodyThe point at which every further attempt costs you the recovery.
05File Systems & Formats
What the format quietly does and does not notice.