Please yourself, of course, but I wouldn’t buy another one. Mine was a 500GB unit that I used with Time Machine to back up my iMac’s drive. Luckily, the iMac drive has outlasted the 4-year old Elephant Storage Drive. Kinda not the way it’s supposed to go, though.
I believed the external drive was really built. Carbon Computing makes them exclusively and I’ve always had good service from the Queen East store.
Apparently, I need at least 2 backup drives… preferably ones with better than the Elephant Storage one year warrantee. Carbon Computing wants 65 diagnostic dollars to even look at their old hard drive and then who knows how much to retrieve whatever data might still be on it. Nope, I’m not throwing good money after bad.
Unfortunately, I bought two Elephant Storage drives, mine and one that’s backing up Danica’s Mac. Hers is a year younger, but I expect it to fail. Better get another backup drive to back it up! The enclosures are very well made and offer 800 and 400 Firewire connections. Maybe I’ll use the cases and put new hard drives inside.
Storage has come down in cost per GB so much since I laid out about $400 for Elephants, I can replace them for a lot less now. My data is gone, though. That’s annoying.
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Why don’t you just back up to the cloud?
I like to know what country my files are in and who has access to them. The internet dependancy seems like a weakness, too.
I guess the death of the elephant means your Time Machine files are in the trash too? That sucks…..
It does suck, because I had stored some files there in addition to the backup files. Whatever they were, they are toast, now. I’ll tuck the hard drive away somewhere, in case I ever decide that something valuable needs a retrieval attempt.
To think that they call paper things “ephemera”! Our digital civilization is more ephemeral by far.
Of course, you know that these drives can be restored. They usually don’t fail mechanically. The drives become corrupted, but can be cleaned. All you do is move your files and then use a program like Disc Utility to erase and reformat. The drives return as good as new. Give it a shot. You have nothing to lose, especially if you plan to through them out when they fail.
Thanks, Jake. Four years have passed since I posted this and life goes on, so I guess my data wasn’t that important. Whether or not the hard drive failed mechanically, I can’t recall, but I couldn’t get it to mount to get my files and didn’t want to pay for expensive data retrieval service.
I did reuse the case, though, so not a total loss.
What do I do if I want to retrieve old files that is no longer readable on my MacBook Pro when I plug it in
Depends on the reason why the files are not readable, Makeda. If the hard drive still mounts and you can see the files, it may be that you don’t have an app installed that can open files of that format. If so, just get the right app.
If your hard drive won’t mount at all, I guess you can take it over to Carbon Computing and see what they say. The store is on Queen West, now. Good luck!