Spider in Hard Drive

jw297

This sounds a bit strange, but it is a very genuine question. My boyfriend just spotted a spider peeking out of the vent of his external hard drive and, since his entire PhD is backed up on that hard drive, is understandably a bit freaked out about anything getting in there. Does anyone know how much damage a spider in a hard drive can do, and how to lure it out of there? Obviously don't want to dismantle or shake the hard drive in case of doing damage that way. Any advice greatly appreciated - at the moment we're just staring at the thing waiting for the spider to come out, but it seems quite comfortable in there!

congo_90

afaik the actual hd is sealed inside the casing so mr. spider shouldn't be able to get through to it. This is also to stop dust etc so no sweat Perhaps back up to a flash drive/ usb device for safety sake?

Brady

Nominal at best.. Although its an external HDD (depending on the make) prob a Western Digital, the actual HDD is enclosed within the enclosure so the spider wont actually be walking across the spinning disc's...

Although probably best to ALWAYS have an online back up just in case... like dropbox (its free and he can use it from anywere in the world, he can drop files into it to save like he would on the HDD)

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTUyNTY1ODk

jw297 wrote: »

This sounds a bit strange, but it is a very genuine question. My boyfriend just spotted a spider peeking out of the vent of his external hard drive and, since his entire PhD is backed up on that hard drive, is understandably a bit freaked out about anything getting in there. Does anyone know how much damage a spider in a hard drive can do, and how to lure it out of there? Obviously don't want to dismantle or shake the hard drive in case of doing damage that way. Any advice greatly appreciated - at the moment we're just staring at the thing waiting for the spider to come out, but it seems quite comfortable in there!

jw297

Ah that makes sense alright, hopefully that's the case. Stuff is backed up in various places alright, but this is where everything is in one place together, so it's still valuable enough to not want to loose it!

jw297

Brady wrote: »

Although probably best to ALWAYS have an online back up just in case... like dropbox (its free and he can use it from anywere in the world, he can drop files into it to save like he would on the HDD)

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTUyNTY1ODk

Hadn't heard of that before, very helpful, thanks!

bette

PogMoThoin

Whatever about the spider, don't leave Yourself trusting a mechanical hard drive without having backups stored elsewhere. They do just die without warning, be warned

jw297

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Whatever about the spider, don't leave Yourself trusting a mechanical hard drive without having backups stored elsewhere. They do just die without warning, be warned

God yeah, definitely have other back-ups. Have heard too many horror stories of years of work being lost! Just that this is the only place its all together because there's a lot of huge files, so they're saved in various place, about 500Gb worth!

corkcomp

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Whatever about the spider, don't leave Yourself trusting a mechanical hard drive without having backups stored elsewhere. They do just die without warning, be warned

+1 the spider could be the least of your worries

spider guardian

strange, that's where the term 'bugs' come from, back in the old days when computers occupied entire rooms, insects used to crawl into them and fry the circuits, hence "there's a ****** bug in the computer"!

ricman

Copy the phd to a folder on the pc, and burn it to a cdr or dvdr disk.
A phd would easily fit on one cdr =700meg .PUT CD and dvd in a dvd case,
store in a safe dry place.External drives can fail at anytime.Make 4 copys of the phd file.Hard drives have a limited life span.The actual drive is sealed .

bonzodog2

Yeah the spider won't hurt your data, but if he's had a night on the town, he might puke over the electronics in the disk enclosure. DEFINITELY make several copies (and test them !) of important self-created work - home movie clips,photos,thesis, etc. Movies and music you can get again !

ricman

IF I WAS a student i,d have 3 copys of every file,project , image ,hardrives ,cdrs,dvdrs are extremely cheap now.
I remember when 40gig was the standard pc hard drive, now its 250/500gig.

worded

That free backup is cool

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg0NzQ4MjI5

CreepingDeath

jw297 wrote: »

Does anyone know how much damage a spider in a hard drive can do

I think it's just trying to create a web site.

bonzodog2

CreepingDeath wrote: »

I think it's just trying to create a web site.

Maybe its one employed by Google to index the OP's disk. You know what they're like, data, data, data, data, data. :rolleyes:

wolfric

Just an interesting note for the op. If you're interested in storing files google docs would be a great place to put them all.

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603 Here are the file size limits

Not to mention the benifits of sharing them with other people and give them read or write permissions etc and even have more than 1 person working on a file at the same time

worded

wolfric wrote: »

Just an interesting note for the op. If you're interested in storing files google docs would be a great place to put them all.

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603 Here are the file size limits

Not to mention the benifits of sharing them with other people and give them read or write permissions etc and even have more than 1 person working on a file at the same time

Do you use it? I gave it a quick read and it converts documnets to .htmls?

wolfric

yup i do indeed and love it. You won't exactly see the html form. At a guess it's just stored in that form so that it's easy to interface with their online client. it's free with any google account to try out no fees etc.



You get the choice to convert when you upload a file. These are the formats you can save a spreadsheets and documents as (there are more files types than just those though)

For documents:
Visit the edit page of the document you'd like to save, click File, then select one of the Download as options. Here are the supported file types for documents:

HTML
RTF
Word
Open Office
PDF
Text
For spreadsheets:

Visit the edit page of the spreadsheet you'd like to save, click File, then point your mouse to the Export option. A list of supported formats appears, from which you can select the format you'd like to export with. Here are the supported file types for spreadsheets:
CSV
HTML
ODS
PDF
XLS
TXT: only for a single sheet

Prezatch

CreepingDeath wrote: »

I think it's just trying to create a web site.

:D

And the fact that your username is CreepingDeath makes it 100 times more epic

Also, on the topic of backups in multiple locations - I use a program called Goodsync to have my 2 external HDs up to date and mirroring each other. Highly recommended.