>>>>You were certainly right on that suggestion. The event logs showed many errors, including quite a few disk i/o errors. I will never know exactly how or when the problem began but I still suspect it was associated with the backup software. I ended up purchasing a new HD and restoring from an older backup, then copying only the newer files that were truly essential. The procedure was probably overkill, and took a week to fix (formated the new disk at least 3 times to get the restore done correctly), but everything seems to be working now. The down side is the lost productivity and stress; the up side is I have lots of disk space now :-)
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>>>Glad you got it sorted.
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>>>These days (mechanical) hard drives are incredibly cheap. If you rely heavily on a particular machine it's a good idea to have at least 2 hard drives in a mirrored (RAID1) array. Everything you do is simultaneously copied to 2 separate drives, not just one. If one fails, you're still OK until you can get a replacement drive and return to full redundancy. These days most new desktop motherboards support hardware RAID directly, as do the majority of boards less than, say, 3 or 4 years old.
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>>>It's worked well for me; I've had 3 complete drive failures of WD Caviar Black 1TB drives since Feb. 2010, but zero data loss from any of those failures.
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>>Ah, that proves to me that those drives are not reliable. If it occurs that frequent, I'd not feel comfortable despite the RAID config.
>
>Anyone doing serious work on a computer should also have regular file-based and image backups. Those should also include offsite or cloud-based backups, to cover the case of total loss of computer and/or backup media due to theft, fire etc. There are only two types of computer users - those who are true believers in backup, and those who are about to become true believers.
>
>I have multi-level disaster recovery in place. AFAIC RAID1 is just one of those levels; having gone through several drive failures I know it works. I actually feel more comfortable than if I'd implemented RAID1 and never had a failure, in which case I would not be sure it works. YMMV.

Well, I must be lucky I guess in 20 years and tents of computers and HDs later, I've only dealth with 2 HD crashes.
That does not mean that we don't take backups seriously. We have Raid 1 config on the servers, make daily backups of the important stuff. But due to the volume of data (several hundred GB) it is not so easy to upload that to a remote site, so that is only done once a month or so. So in case of theft or fire, we might lose some data (though much of it is scattered arround the world on several servers and workstations (we use Vault Source control). We currently are looking into getting much of our data and software on the cloud, just to deal with this threat.

But nontheless having had 3 HD crashes in just a year seems a little too much to be confortable IMO. A client now learned a lesson. Crashed his HD twice over the years and had to go to a special recovery company to get his data back.

Walter,