SSD failure, best practice

[donw35]

I am posting this so that my process may either inspire or save someone from hours of work.

on my system I use a 120GB SSD for OS and Apps, data and all other items are stored on secondary hard disk. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make backups of my SSD onto an inexpensive USB external HDD.

Yesterday my Mac locked up and when rebooted would not load, took SSD out and could not mount it on my MBP or MacMini, couldn't mount it on Windows7 to even reformat it. Its under warranty so no beg deal there, I have a spare HDD and restored my backup clone to that drive and I was up and running except for a few small things that need to be done.

What could have been hours of down time was mitigated by keep an up to date clone of the boot drive. It only takes about 20 minutes to clone your boot drive. I do it when I go to lunch and its done.

Enjoy

 

[wonderspark]

I have twin Crucial M4 256GB SSDs with the same firmware (v309) and use one as boot, the other as an up-to-date clone for this very reason. Should the boot fail, I can swap in the clone in a matter of seconds. I use SuperDuper!

 

[FluJunkie]

I am posting this so that my process may either inspire or save someone from hours of work.

on my system I use a 120GB SSD for OS and Apps, data and all other items are stored on secondary hard disk. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make backups of my SSD onto an inexpensive USB external HDD.

Yesterday my Mac locked up and when rebooted would not load, took SSD out and could not mount it on my MBP or MacMini, couldn't mount it on Windows7 to even reformat it. Its under warranty so no beg deal there, I have a spare HDD and restored my backup clone to that drive and I was up and running except for a few small things that need to be done.

What could have been hours of down time was mitigated by keep an up to date clone of the boot drive. It only takes about 20 minutes to clone your boot drive. I do it when I go to lunch and its done.

Enjoy

I do the same thing - my SSD boot drive is cloned every morning.

Importantly, make sure to boot from that drive every now and again to verify your "Fail functional" system is still working.

 

[pprior]

Of course if you're blindly cloning with no versioning, then this protects only from a catastrophic drive failure, and any file problems will be copied to the clone.

Other than the short time it would take to do a restore, i'm not clear why approach is preferable to a good time machine backup.

 

[tamvly]

I have twin Crucial M4 256GB SSDs with the same firmware (v309) and use one as boot, the other as an up-to-date clone for this very reason. Should the boot fail, I can swap in the clone in a matter of seconds. I use SuperDuper!

Hmmm, seems like a waste to have an SSD as a backup. But if you can afford it ...

 

[wonderspark]

I ended up with two of these SSDs unintentionally, so it's a matter of using the thing or not using it. I also have the original 640GB HDD that I use for my "prior version" clone. I clone thoughtfully and with purpose.

The M4 is only $200 at B&H, which isn't that expensive in my opinion.