A reminder

[Pol]

A reminder to be sure to back up all your important files and documents very regularly. Do it today, do it now!

The HD on my PC died unexpectedly early this morning and without any prior hint of any problems, no warning whatsoever. Mercifully I do backups very regularly onto external drives. I also store important documents in a dedicated folder online and in personal webspace.

I did lose just a few things though. Nothing crucial but still a bit of a nuisance. I'm working solely from a laptop atm. I hate laptops so I won't be around much until I can get a desktop up and running again, indispensable for enabling me to be online though.


Pol

[Barr1e]

Re: A reminder

Thanks Pol -

Due to a busy schedule that was a timely reminder.

Sorry to hear about your machine and hope you are on the site again fairly soon with your new set up.

Regards. Barr1e

[Ian]

Re: A reminder

A reminder to be sure to back up all your important files and documents very regularly. Do it today, do it now!

The HD on my PC died unexpectedly early this morning and without any prior hint of any problems, no warning whatsoever. Mercifully I do backups very regularly onto external drives. I also store important documents in a dedicated folder online and in personal webspace.

I did lose just a few things though. Nothing crucial but still a bit of a nuisance. I'm working solely from a laptop atm. I hate laptops so I won't be around much until I can get a desktop up and running again, indispensable for enabling me to be online though.


Pol

I can vouch for this, Pol. Just before a two week foreign trip back in June I transferred all my files from a laptop I was replacing to a new one. I mentally regarded the old laptop as my current backup. But I managed to sell it on more quickly than I had expected and had to delete all my files on the old laptop before supplying it to the new owner. I should have backed up the new laptop before doing this, but I didn't... on the day before my departure the new laptop decided it wouldn't boot up. I threw all the recover utilities I could at it, but no joy. The laptop was physically fine - the HD was intact, but some how a critical part of the boot sequence had been corrupted. I had lost no data, but the only way re-initialise the laptop was to get my personal data off the hard drive before reinstalling the OS. Unfortunately, with no Windows, the USB ports had no enhanced mode support (fast USB) so the 60GB of my personal data was being copied at, I estimate, 200K bytes per second - or a megabyte every 5 seconds. That meant the copying process would take something like 80 hours.

When I eventually managed to complete this task (several weeks later!) and copied the data back to the re-initialised laptop, with high-speed USB enabled, the 60GB of data took just a couple of hours to copy across.

I'm currently backing up daily!

Ian

[Pol]

Re: A reminder

I can vouch for this, Pol. Just before a two week foreign trip back in June I transferred all my files from a laptop I was replacing to a new one. I mentally regarded the old laptop as my current backup. But I managed to sell it on more quickly than I had expected and had to delete all my files on the old laptop before supplying it to the new owner. I should have backed up the new laptop before doing this, but I didn't... on the day before my departure the new laptop decided it wouldn't boot up. I threw all the recover utilities I could at it, but no joy. The laptop was physically fine - the HD was intact, but some how a critical part of the boot sequence had been corrupted. I had lost no data, but the only way re-initialise the laptop was to get my personal data off the hard drive before reinstalling the OS. Unfortunately, with no Windows, the USB ports had no enhanced mode support (fast USB) so the 60GB of my personal data was being copied at, I estimate, 200K bytes per second - or a megabyte every 5 seconds. That meant the copying process would take something like 80 hours.

When I eventually managed to complete this task (several weeks later!) and copied the data back to the re-initialised laptop, with high-speed USB enabled, the 60GB of data took just a couple of hours to copy across.

I'm currently backing up daily!

Ian

Computers can be a nightmare and it's made worse by the fact that you depend on them for digital photography.

I bought this particular laptop after my PC went belly-up in a big way after I'd installed SP2. My eldest son persuaded me to go for the 17" laptop as a backup machine and I'm so glad he did. Though I never really like working on the lappy it does enable me to get online. I also have CS3 installed on it so I can at least d/l from the SD crads and transfer them to an external drivefor storage if I can't face post processing on the laptop (which needs recalibrating)

I lost a folder of maybe half a dozen photos and I'd only been planning on keeping a couple of those. Nothing important and nothing I can't repeat. What p's me off most is that there's a lot of fairly sensitive info on the failed HD that I'd rather have deleted. Our eldest is coming to collect it and he'll see if can find the info by putting it in a casing and exploring it as an external drive. He can also get it magnetically erased and made safe, using the machine at his place of work, so that makes me feel a little easier.

I'll set about deciding what to do about a replacement when he gets here. I don't want to be fiddling about with a new HD in the old box as it's too big and too heavy for me to get around the back when needed. I'm hoping to get a newer and smaller box that I can manage better myself.

The irony of it is that I'd assembled the folder I lost the previous evening but didn't transfer a copy to the Firelite as we had a visitor. I decided it would be ok leaving it on the desktop until morning and the wretched HD died overnight.

My most important photos are all stored online too, as well as me having good quality Photobox prints stored in albums ... so that's ok. I also have other online storage and personal webspace where I've been sending copies of important documents and email receipts etc. I've done that ever since that major crash I had a couple of years ago.

An email sub a/c or even the likes of a Hotmail a/c is a good way of making sure you can retrieve eg serial numbers, addresses etc from a web based email a/c if all else fails.

Pol

[Stephen]

Re: A reminder

The latest Apple OS, Leopard, has a built in backup system called Time Machine, which incrementally backs up your complete system to an external drive. The software blows Windaz System Restore away. When I first saw it I was amazed as its possible to go back an hour for the last 24, daily for the past month, and weekly until the disk is full. Individual files can be retrieved in seconds.

I have recently bought the Apple time Capsule, which is essentially an external drive and router which networks with your machine and backs up using Time Machine, wirelessly. The Time Capsule allows you to plugin other external drives via a USB connection and therefore make them available wirelessly to any networked computers in the house.

All this does of course not come cheap, and the time capsule is probably twice as much as a regular external drive, but hey, what price functionality and peace of mine

[Pol]

Re: A reminder

The latest Apple OS, Leopard, has a built in backup system called Time Machine, which incrementally backs up your complete system to an external drive. The software blows Windaz System Restore away. When I first saw it I was amazed as its possible to go back an hour for the last 24, daily for the past month, and weekly until the disk is full. Individual files can be retrieved in seconds.

I have recently bought the Apple time Capsule, which is essentially an external drive and router which networks with your machine and backs up using Time Machine, wirelessly. The Time Capsule allows you to plugin other external drives via a USB connection and therefore make them available wirelessly to any networked computers in the house.

All this does of course not come cheap, and the time capsule is probably twice as much as a regular external drive, but hey, what price functionality and peace of mine

I've been asking my son about the option of changing over. He's well and truly against the idea. I won't go into the details, except to say it would be an expensive option that wouldn't be practical in the grand scheme of things.

Pol

[Stephen]

Re: A reminder

I've been asking my son about the option of changing over. He's well and truly against the idea. I won't go into the details, except to say it would be an expensive option that wouldn't be practical in the grand scheme of things.

Pol

Haha Sounds like he's looking after his inheritance

[Pol]

Re: A reminder

Haha Sounds like he's looking after his inheritance

Yeah right - that'll be why he's offered to come home and 'choose' with me either at the w/e or later next week.

He's the same son who came to sort out the SP2 fiasco in 2006 and 'kindly walked me through' choosing this huge, heavy, expensive powerful laptop. They keep reassuring me it'll be "ideal for 'fid'" when his current lappy eventually conks out.

It's always great fun spending someone else's dosh for them innit.


Pol

[Pol]

Re: A reminder

P.S... I already have the new iiyama monitor, which I really like and want to keep. So I have my eye on THIS at the moment. I'll ask him to go through the specs and we can customise it together.

Gotta rush off now as David's ready and waiting for me. I wanna go and try to repeat those pix I lost from the other day. Hopefully I might be able to get better ones this time anyway.

Pol

[Patrick]

Re: A reminder

P.S... I already have the new iiyama monitor, which I really like and want to keep. So I have my eye on THIS at the moment. I'll ask him to go through the specs and we can customise it together.

Gotta rush off now as David's ready and waiting for me. I wanna go and try to repeat those pix I lost from the other day. Hopefully I might be able to get better ones this time anyway.

Pol

I have posted this before, I now use a 2TB Buffalo H/D server with RAID 5 (sounds not unlike Stephens Time Capsule, but probably less sophisticated)
I synchronise my backup with Goodsync very convenient to use. It can also be used wirelessly through my router, which has the advantage of both the laptop & PC having access to the backed up images.

Patrick

[Ian]

Re: A reminder

The latest Apple OS, Leopard, has a built in backup system called Time Machine, which incrementally backs up your complete system to an external drive. The software blows Windaz System Restore away. When I first saw it I was amazed as its possible to go back an hour for the last 24, daily for the past month, and weekly until the disk is full. Individual files can be retrieved in seconds.

I have recently bought the Apple time Capsule, which is essentially an external drive and router which networks with your machine and backs up using Time Machine, wirelessly. The Time Capsule allows you to plugin other external drives via a USB connection and therefore make them available wirelessly to any networked computers in the house.

All this does of course not come cheap, and the time capsule is probably twice as much as a regular external drive, but hey, what price functionality and peace of mine

Stephen knows I am an Apple sceptic But I'm not a PC evangelist either. I just prefer the variety and value for money aspect of the PC platform. I also like the fact that I don't have to pay for cosmetic features if I don't want to. But sure, PCs have their problems! Although it's mainly down to what you're used to, I really don't enjoy using PCs and my brother in law, quite independently from me, has just given up on his Mac after switching from a PC as he just can't get on with the OS.

But that doesn't mean I don't admire certain Apple offerings and Time Machine is certainly admirable, especially because it's easy to use and included as part of the OS (I like that because of the functionality, not for a value consideration as you have to pay more for Macs in the first place!).

But on the other hand, it's nothing really new. It's what various Windows backup utilities have been capable of for several years, but packaged and presented in a better way on the Mac. That said, It could be that Acronis (a popular Windows backup solution), for example, is more flexible. I don't know enough about Time Machine, so correct me if I am wrong, for example, but it doesn't appear to compress the backup files. This can be good (less system overhead as no compression is being performed) and bad (uses up excessive storage). Although Acronis compresses the backup, you can browse all the files quite transparently. It has very flexible scheduling and you can work while it backs up.

One thing I like about Acronis is that you can very simply and easily replace a broken hard drive with the backup and have your PC up and running again. With Macs, it's often very hard to even get at the hard drive to replace it!

Ian