There but for the grace of God (reminder to back up your stuff)
Fred Hawkins
Posts: 997
13 months after·my last laptop turned bricklike, my second laptop has developed a Vista condition (0xc004e002 "license store contains inconsistent data"; might be fixable after sacrificing something to Redmond)
Of course, nothing recent was backed up. Again. After all it was my new computer...
I can still poke around it, but mostly in SAFE mode. So I guess I'm lucky.
Of course, nothing recent was backed up. Again. After all it was my new computer...
I can still poke around it, but mostly in SAFE mode. So I guess I'm lucky.
Meanwhile, I'm back using my repaired first (warranty had two weeks to go, whew! Took 4 or 5·months though.).Reminder said...
If the shoe fits (you haven't backed up for a long while), burn a backup dvd, cd, flashdrive, what-have-you.
Comments
Just a suggestion
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Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=753439
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Here's the script I use...
robocopy "C:\Program Files\Parallax Inc\Propeller Tool v1.2" f:\development\propeller *.* /s
Just put that in a bat file and save it to the usb drive along with robocopy.
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
On the USB drive note, that's a great idea, but DON'T do development on the USB drive. That's the other mistake I made a few months ago. I had all of my Vmusic2/Text2Speech BS2 programs on a flash drive ONLY and I lost it in a parking lot. It was found the next day, crushed by a few tires. Harvesting a few parts from another flash drive enabled me to get my files back, but that took a few weeks.
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~~ dRu ~~
That's great you got your files back. Did you take pictures? If so, that's a great story to tell. Clear object lesson on why having more than one copy of your data is important.
One thing I like to do is just email the file tree to myself. Google has a copy of it, if nothing else.. It takes a LOT of code and data to exceed 20MB, and you've got snapshots over time. Plus, you can just pull code down to whatever box you are running on. For a lot of things this has mixed benefits. For the Propeller, it just rocks. Unpack the archive, hook up your gear and you are off and running on most any machine with a USB for the Prop itself.
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
Chat in real time with other Propellerheads on IRC #propeller @ freenode.net
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
I got burned once. Once was enough.
I also recommend all windows users have a linux live-cd in their laptop bags. If the excrement hits the rotary air distributor then I can talk them through booting linux, copying the contents of their laptop across to a USB disk *before* they start futzing about with anti-spyware or anti-virus programs.
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Cardinal Fang! Fetch the comfy chair.
Hey, how about that? I checked, and my ISP also provides backup. I was already paying for it - might as well use it. I'm 32% through a full backup right now, and set for weekly incrementals at midnight.
On top of that, apparently I can have email links sent to my backed up files, so that if I need to send (a trusted) someone a large file that would clog email, they can instead just get an email link to click and FTP it over.
I really should pay more attention to the goodies I've already paid for.
BTW, I floss every day.
http://www.mozy.com
http://www.delldatasafe.com
Additionally, here is a simple backup batch file you can use to backup important stuff to a thumb drive, edit line 3 to reflect the drive letter of your thumb drive. Paste the below text into notepad, then file>save as, select all files from the save as type drop down box, now name it whatever you want with the extension .bat· Now you can manually click this whenever you want to backup, or you can schedule it to run in windows task scheduler. PM me or post if you have any questions on this.
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:: variables
set drive=G:\Backup
set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r·/y
echo ### Backing up My Documents...
%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%drive%\My Documents"
echo ### Backing up Favorites...
%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%drive%\Favorites"
echo ### Backing up email and address book (Outlook Express)...
%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book" "%drive%\Address Book"
%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities" "%drive%\Outlook Express"
echo ### Backing up email and contacts (MS Outlook)...
%backupcmd% "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook" "%drive%\Outlook"
echo ### Backing up the Registry...
if not exist "%drive%\Registry" mkdir "%drive%\Registry"
if exist "%drive%\Registry\regbackup.reg" del "%drive%\Registry\regbackup.reg"
[url=:// What is regedit ?]regedit[/url] /e "%drive%\Registry\regbackup.reg"
:: use below syntax to backup other directories...
:: %backupcmd% "...source directory..." "%drive%\...destination dir..."
echo Backup Complete!
@pause
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@ bradc, 14 tb of raid 6 is quite a monster, what kind of hardware, enclosure, etc etc?
Post Edited (KB3JJG) : 12/20/2008 7:24:47 AM GMT
I have 2 boxes. One has 15 drives in sata hotswap enclosures, the other has 10 drives in sata hotswap enclosures and 5 drives internally.
I have the 15 drive and 10 drive arrays configured as RAID-6, 3 of the internal drives are in a RAID-5 and the other two are RAID-1 (OS, swap and scratch).
The 15 drive box is an old Athlon XP with 4 4xSATA controllers on a single PCI bus (it's slow). It boots over PXE and loads the OS as a linux initramfs. It has 1.5G of RAM so it runs completely from RAM. I can comfortably stream about 15MB/s to and from the box, so it does what I need it to do, but a RAID check or rebuild can take 15 hours. Need more bus bandwidth.
The other box is the main server. It's just been upgraded to a Quad core AMD Phenom with 4G of ram. It has all its drives (15 of them) hanging off various PCIe buses and can quite happily pull 400MB/s off the main array. Its a bit of overkill for a home entertainment server, but it does the job.
i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/ytixelprep/F.jpg
It's a chewing gum and duct tape job (literally, the motherboard in the 15 drive storage box is held in with double sided tape), but it has been stable for over 4 years now. I just upgraded 10 of the drives in the tall box from 250GB to 1TB, and retired them with about 37.5k hours on them. So it has been very reliable.
They both live in a 20sq ft room with a half horsepower wall banger AC (propeller controlled of course) and tick along quite happily.
It gives me some nice storage to play with anyway (and compiles on a quad core go quite quickly)
The most important thing for longevity seems to be a quality PSU and adequate drive cooling. All the drives report consistent temps of ~35C, which according to an engineer I spoke to inside a major drive manuf is about optimum.
The whole shebang runs Linux and allows me to have several headless/driveless boxes around the place (pxe/nfs) for streaming entertainment (satellite / DVD / whatever)
I have another box in the corner built of spare drives and bits I had lying around that gives me another 2TB of scratch to play with, but it's not something I put valuable data on.
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Cardinal Fang! Fetch the comfy chair.
A backup is no good unless you try to recover your computer from it
When·I first got NORTON GHOST Ver 14.0 I did a backup of the system and file folders
then·I tried to use the recovery disk and it told me that there was no· recovery· point that was available to use
so I had to redo the backup agian and then it worked right
Now when ever·I do a backup·I try it to make sure that it works
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··Thanks for any·
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Sam
Every so often I burn to CD/DVD which keeps history of my changes. I now use an external drive to backup my computers drives fairly often.
Two things come out of this:
1. I can go back years (needed to go back 6 months once)
2. I can prove authorship of my designs (never required yet, but who knows)
So save/backup your data (not programs) regularly. It may take time to rebuild, but at least you have it. It's too late once it's gone
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Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
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Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
I had a computer system in the 70's that was the length of a garage. Each drive was the size of a washing machine, was 10MB and cost $16,000 each. It was actually in my garage but it was an airconditioned sealed room. I was still using it in 1999 when I sold it for scrap to China - for the gold.
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Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
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Oh I still recall quite vividly my first Seagate 10MB ST-412. The clatter of the stepper as it recalibrated on bootup.
I've actually still got an NEC 20MB ST-506 interface drive and 8-Bit ISA controller sitting in a box at home somewhere. I just can't bring myself to throw it out.
I'm in the process of rationalising and upgrading my storage. I have 25 250G drives that I'm in the process of upgrading to 1TB drives. It's a time consuming upgrade but at the end of it I should be able to have more storage for about 250W less power consumption. Its funny. 4 years ago when I assembled my first 2TB RAID from 250G disks I figured I'd never fill it... you know the rest..
Before I moved last time, I chucked a lot of stuff out. One thing I tossed was an old Bondwell CP/M laptop. 64k of ram and a low density, single sided 3.5" drive. Out of all the stuff I tossed, that I regret the most. I even have the original wordstar disk and manual for it in a box somewhere.
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Cardinal Fang! Fetch the comfy chair.
The hosting company backs it up regularly and I don't have to worry about it beyond that. It's there no mater where my laptops or computers are.
All of the hardware, cooling and space issues belong to them - well worth the money.
Speaking of the old days, anybody remember the 10" floppy drives and alignment disks?
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Signature space for rent, only $1.
Send cash and signature to CannibalRobotics.
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Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
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One thing I have started doing for customers, and for the refurbished computers we sell, is partition a space on their harddrives and point the my Documents folder to it. Most folks don't even realize when they come back in to have their computer cleaned off, due to some virus or something, that I can reload their OS without touching their files! It's by no means fool proof, but helps 90% of the people I serve. I try to tell them that Hard drives do go bad, but they either don't listen or can't afford better protection.
What's really a shame though is when it happens and their is a working DVD burner in their system. I am slowly learning to have no sympathy for them!
You mean 8". I had one on a Tandy Model II which I used with CP/M. I remember borrowing an alignment disk and twiddling something.
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle