More Tech Meltdown
August 27th, 2005So a week ago, we had the meltdown. Well, it’s not over.
After realizing that the hard drive rescue only showed us that the drive is really dorked and will require a reformat. In order to save the files, a very very large hard drive would have to be purchased. So that was on the To Do list for today.
However, most important was taking care of the yardwork. The lawn hadn’t been properly cared for in a couple of weeks, because when you have a weekend like the last one, you don’t have the time or emotional energy required to groom the yard. I did spend some time with the dog listening to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” a few times last weekend. I think it worked, because he’s spending a little more time with us. Chuck is particularly fond of the reverb on the snare drum and how they eq’d it.
Also on my To Do list was migrating 3hive away from the beta software we were using to publish the site. I did a test on this site late last night and it seemed to work, so I figured I’d be safe. Why? Because I have balls of steel, that’s why.
We also needed to drive to the outlet mall 30 minutes away to get “outlet” prices on shoes for Leta. In her 18 months, these are the first pairs of shoes we’ve had to buy, because the world is full of nice and wonderful people who have given us shoes since before Leta was born. Thank you again, nice and wonderful people.
So my day was shaping up to be busy, if not hectic.
I took care of the lawn needs first thing, weed whacking the shit out of it, nay getting up in the veritable grill of the long grass. When Leta went down for her nap, Heather hit the gym and I migrated 3hive. I was using a PC to do it and the FTP app that I used blows, because the migration failed. I was nearly furious. After spending 90 minutes re-uploading and checking and chmod-ing, I was not able to log in, receiving a perplexing text error that nearly lead to the premature death of the PC. Heather returned and I left in a bit of a huff to purchase a hard drive while she slept/watched Leta.
Good news: Super Saturday Sale on Giant Hard Drives! 300 Gigabytes for $149. SWEET. Also checked out Apple’s new mouse with the nubby trackball thing. Pretty ok. No diagonal scrolling, so not so good for speed-Expose-ing (See “Using Gestures”). In my daily life, I use an awesome five-year old trackball that is huge and works very well with Expose. It’s also very similar in feel to the trackball used on many vintage video games. I grab a file with the lock button, whack the ball to a corner of the screen revealing all the windows, roll to a window and let the window flash and pop into focus then release the lock button. Boom. Speed drag n drop. The new mouse is more like stroll-Expose-ing. What are they thinking with no diagonal support? Can this be changed via software?
For the nerds, the new drive is a SATA drive, with accompanying groovy cable slots that meant the new drive took about 2 minutes to install, plug-in and format thanks to the very sweet G5 enclosure (yes, I know there isn’t nearly enough expandability in the enclosure, but have you seen the size of the heat sinks for the dual processors?). I did not partition the drive, as in the end, we’ll have two drives and we’ll make whichever one isn’t the boot drive the scratch drive. Also, we’ll have half a terabyte. I didn’t think we’d come to it this quickly, but drastic times, et al.
I had to watch Leta for a bit while Heather got ready for the outlet trip, and I filed a Help Ticket with Six Apart explaining my error message. I also sent an email to the 3hive posse, explaining that once again, it seemed as though technology was getting the better of me. I also set Disk Warrior to repair the dying drive and alerted my legal team.
We drove to the outlet mall, Leta being cute as ever when Heather broke out some cookies, Leta said, “Hey, yeah! Wow!”
Leta did pretty well at the outlets, but towards the end, we’d enter a store and she’d scream so I’d turn the stroller around and she’d stop the instant we left the store. Funny the first time, not so much the fourteenth.
When we got back home, I checked my Help Ticket and jumped on a Mac to do the FTP-ing. Fixed the error. 3hive is alive and well again. PC 0 Mac 1. Six Apart support = awesome.
I then checked the mothership computer to see how Disk Warrior was doing. Wanted me to copy files. So I did. 145 gigabytes of nearly a quarter million files. I’m told by the Mac OS Finder that such a copy will take 7 hours. I don’t believe it, but decide to let it happen while I add a little functionality to dooce.com’s main page and then retire for the night.
Some of the comments on the last tech meltdown post were along the lines of “I thought Macs were better than this.” If you use a computer from any manufacturer, it has a hard drive. This drive can and probably will fail. It can be any number of things that will cause the failure, the idea is that one is prepared for such an event. I’ve grown lazy in my data strategies as OS X has been so solid. Heather’s iBook is never down, save for system updates. One time, I did an uptime query on her old iBook and it came back with 98 days. It would have been longer had I not wanted to upgrade it so often.
For this most recent failure, I’d like to blame Apple’s lame security update, but I think the drive has always been wonky, and it just took the upgrade to trigger it. I’ve had two major hard drive failures in my life, one on a Mac and one on a PC. Both were catastrophic and forced me to lose a lot of data and work. Once this happens to you, you realize that the cost of the computer is almost negigible compared to the data it holds and you start to loosen up the money belt to cover your ass in the future.
In the past four years of using Macs, we haven’t lost any data, save what we might lose with this incident. Heather’s old iBook is waiting for me to decide if I’m going to try to get it repaired or not. If the repair is a few hundred dollars US, I might do it. Dunno. But the data is still there, waiting for us should we need it, thanks to FireWire and target disk mode. If Windows has something like this as part of XP, I’m not aware of it.
What are your favorite backup schemes/apps/practices? o
As a PC user (and more a writer than a photographer) I have an external 80 gig hard drive that I copy the “My Documents” folder over to once a month. Easy, simple, works for my needs.
External hard drive, combined with rsync and two different (incremental) backup schemes for “My Documents” (daily backup) and multimedia files, which usually don’t change on a regular basis (occasional backup). Works smoothly for ca 20 gig – a plain copying scheme isn’t really an option with that amount of personal data (as is probably for your 145 gig).
Setting up rsync was much easier than i thought, and should work for OS X as well (i use it with XP).
Maybe I did this the hard way – I have a nightly task that remote-logins to my Linux machine, tars up everything important, pulls it down to my Windows machine, puts it on my external drive, then runs basically an ‘ls -d | xargs cp -urfv’ via Cygwin to copy everything over that’s changed. There’s some additional processing in there, of course.
I run two FreeBSD servers at my home: one for web and mail, the other for data storage. I have rsync scripts that can be run from my iMac and from my iBook that’ll sync directories to the data storage server. I only back up stuff that I can’t reinstall.
I don’t have as much data as you seem to have (how can you possibly need that much drive space?? Music storage? Movies? Pictures?) so the 60something gigs on the data server are more than sufficient for my wife and I.
I’ve considered other backup schemes but so far this seems to be working, plus it’s free (discounting the cost of the hardware). I wouldn’t use the rsync method for a company but it’s great for personal use.
Space? Digital Photos. In a year we’ve racked up 40 gigs. And that’s not taking nearly as much as we’d like. There will be many hard drives in our lives…
Teehee. The Windows version of Target Disk mode is to remove the hard drive, stick it in an enclosure or in another computer, and boot from a different drive to attempt to recover data. Not nearly so nice. I support both Macs and PCs at a large-ish university, and while the PC people have lost data left and right, the Mac people never have (on my watch anyway), for a variety of reasons.
my favorite form of backup is a stack of paper on the floor next to the window that i’m jumping from if my G4 ever bites the dust.
Sounds like you’re having a time with all this stuff. Good luck fixing it all!
I’m old-fashioned… I like removable media.
I just installed and created a backup set using BackUp MyPC. It took most of the day and a stack of CDs for the first go around, but keeping it up to date will be much easier from now on. It’s automated, so I can use my soft melon to remember other more important things, like feeding my 15-month old…
I used to burn CDs, but it got ridiculous. I have an external harddrive with 120 gigs. I just checked it and I have it half full after a little over a year. I think I will get a DVD burner with my next laptop in a year or so.
It was weighing on my mind this year to better protect our digital photos. With the size of each jpg files nearing 2M, removable media, even DVD, was quickly becoming a pain. When my Asus motherboard died this summer I took that as the opportunity to purchase a new Gigabyte motherboard that supported RAID 1, also known as disk mirroring, with IDE drives.
If have two 160G disks mirrored together that contain both my OS and data files in two separate partitions. A third 160G drive is used for the OS swap file as well as a Ghost drive backup image of the data partition. Not having to be manual involved in the backup process is key for me.
I think I have a reasonable handle on the hardware failure side of things. My next endeavor will be to include a strategy to protect against flood, fire, theft or whatever else that would destroy, steal or render the three hard drives inoperable. Iím really interested by the P2P backup strategies like OceanStore http://oceanstore.sourceforge.net/
I save photos to my unlimited yahoo storage. I use the drag-and-drop tool that they provide, though it only works with IE (this is the only time I use IE). I also have briefcase storage with Yahoo. I regularly email documents to myself.
What would happen if Yahoo crashed or something? Would I be screwed? I’m thinking yeah.
I back copies of programs and all mp3s and mpeg4s up on dvd and cd. Soon, I’ll need to get an external harddrive for the music. For now, I’m sticking with online storage for photos, though some are on the hard drive.
We have an external hard drive with something like 10X more memory than our home computer that automatically backs up, but based on what everyone else is doing, I’m a little worried that we aren’t doing enough. I’m a novice when it comes to this stuff. I don’t even know what standard procedure is.
Wow you guys rock- i wish i knew how to do fancy backups. All i do is save my photos periodically onto cdrw’s…
Also – $10 says you guys are going to get approximately 10000 pairs of shoes for Leta now…
I’m sorry… I’m still stuck on “balls of steel”…
I read not that recently about using an old tower to build a scsi disc array where you could implement any of the raid configurations that you deem appropriate. Using striping will give you a hot-swappable capability and allow the replaced disc to rebuild itself.
I use http://www.handybackup.com to do incrementals to an external hard drive on a night basis using the scripts included. Then, once every two weeks, I use a second drive that I backup the same way. During the off time for the second drive, it lives in an office desk drawer that can be locked. Disaster recovery + paranoia + lost images = that solution. Oh, and I hear ya on the images — I have like 60 GB, which grows quickly due to my two-year-old.
I’m a big fan of Acronis True Image. I have an external 200 GB HD connected by USB 2.0, and I run Acronis once a month, on average. I also have a “base installation” image ready on a set of bootable DVDs if I ever want to rebuild my PC from scratch.
Blurb– go get yourself a terabyte. It’s decadent, but not entirely gratuitous… and what a wonderful head rush, thinking of all of those blank sectors just waiting to be filled up.
Retrospect. PC or Mac. External HD, Removable media or CD/DVD. Schedule or not schedule. It does everything, and very well at that. The mac version is the better of the two since OS X supports SMB and AFP natively.
If you have .Mac Apple is rumored to be coming out with a new version of “backup” that is supposed to be more than a few scripts thrown together with a gui.
External hard drives are the greatest.
I use use Apple’s “Back up” app and back up selected folders (Pictures + Documents + Web sites I’m working on) to an external 120Gb fire wire drive approx. once a week. In iTunes I use a smart playlist which automatically includes any songs added after a given date; when the data amounts to 650Mb, I burn a CD.
Just out of a tinge of curiosity, though I KNOW this is surely impossible….but…is there any slight chance your harddisc meltdown could have been passed on through the internet or something? Because my harddisc read HARD DISK FAILURE not even 12 hours after I visited your site and read about your drive’s crashing. Not blaming anyone for this problem so please don’t take that idea, just ‘commenting’ on what a freak and extremely unfortunate coincident it is…and how all my files……down the drain…. *sob*
i don’t have a back up scheme.. i probably should, but I do want to say that i L_O_V_E my kensington trackball. i don’t know how i ever lived without it. If i coudl marry it, i would, and then we would have little blue mouses with GINORMOUS balls running arouudn the place.
glad it all worked out in the end!
The trick is to never do anything so important that losing it would cause problems. Yup, the Slacker BackupÆ works like a charm.
I just finally started storing all my work to a hard drive. I purchased a 300GB Seagate External. Seems to be working like a charm. Had a scary run in when I thought I lost a whole wedding that I had not yet edited but already deleted off my CF. But learned some new tricks from some of your comments. (slacker Backup was my favorite!)
Oh and free shoes for the little ones rocks doens’t it.