I let my mom use my computer yesterday and went to my friends house to puff a bowl and when I got back my system drive had crashed. She said that what had happened was the programs started acting all weird and so she decided to restart. On reboot the post now takes for ever and the drive is not properly recognised. It also says can't find NTLDR yada yada yada. Now since i don't keep any data on my system drive i was fine. The only thing on there were programs and windows and my outlook pst which is automatically dispersed to many locations on my network. So all i really had do was find another hard drive and I lucked out by finding a 10000 rpm SCSI drive in one of the servers that i have that got whacked by a power surge last month. So aside from the fact that the SCSI is a bit of a bitch to configure (esp. when you have 2 other PCI IDE controllers in the system) after about 2 hours i was well on my way to a reinstall with no data lost whatsoever. Now this is the first time i have had a drive fail in my computer ever and i have had computers for the past 10 years. I was ready for the worst and it paid of but now I am going to make my back up stratagy even better. I am not quite sure how i am going to do that yet but it will probably invovle adding more harddrives and making my Domain Roots replicate to more places, and perhaps even making some CDs of the really important shit.

I just wanted to warn all of you not to trust a drive no matter what. Make a backup plan make it automated use scripts use Distributed file system use what ever the hell it takes but do something cause disaster can strike at anytime.

The very ironic part of this is that every time my mom has tried to use a computer to do this simple brochure with ms publiser the computer has either crashed or not printed or something. She drove an hour and a half to use my computer cause it was the most reliable one she could think of and my system drive crashed, then she went to my grandparents house and used my grandmothers brand new laptop and the cdrom drive broke. And I got a flat tire on my bike yesterday (first time this season) and I broke my foot yesterday. I think there was some sort of bad thing happening or something. NE way back up your data....NOW!

Yep, I learned the ways of the backup long ago after losing gb's of data downloaded on my ol' 33.6baud modem.

The best/cheapest/easiest backup strategy for the home user today:

Buy an external USB 2 enclosure. Buy a big HD.
Backup to the USB drive.
Backup once a month or after large file changes.



Currently I backup to an HD in my computer and simply disconnect the power. Although this is faster than backing up to USB (100GB+ in 2 1/2hrs) it reduced the available HD space in my computer and is also more prone to failure. The best strategy for backups is to store them away from the activity, which is why I am moving to the USB 2 backup plan very soon.


Now if they only made external interfaces with SATA and SATA external encolsures.....

yes indeed i am ready for the days of sata
scsi is nice but as with all high end things it is a pain in the ass
i have those damn IDE cables all over the place and the rounded ones aren't much better. Does anyone know know of an SATA controller with like 8 or more channels on it that would be ver nice cause i could get a pci slot back and i could use those nice little cables.

i burn a backup cd every week
just the important stuff... financials, documents, email
u know junk like that.

i use nero and a multisession so it finds all the backup dir and adds new files or updates files that have changed.

it's a scsi cdrom so i can still play games and stuff.

yea the SCSI is good stuff
just hooked up an old external SCSI Video RAID drive last week and a 10000 rpm today do to the system drive failing. The seek time is way better and the bottlenecking of my system in the disk area has drastically reduced. The STR is not as good as my IDE RAID 0 array but that is a software dynamic disk array with some very new ata133 drives so it is not a wonder why I get 56 Meg per sec out of it.

i havent not had scsi for a long time just for that reason
during a disk defrag cpu is 0-2%
i was thinking about setting up a raid on my system but i havent decided yet.

Currently I'm actually using a RAID array that actually offers redundency *Shock, horror*
My RAID 0+1 array can cope with any one of my drives failing and most combinations of two before data loss - What are the chances of me loosing two or more at once?
Plus all major non-replaceable data is burnt to CD.
You can never have too many backup's!

I use RAID 0 for workstations, and backup important stuff to CD and RAID 1 (or RAID 5) arrays depending on the network I am on.

i am kinda concerned now that my new office has dirty power.
My APC make loud (not kidding here its really loud) peirceing beeps once or twice an hour. I wonder if this had anything to do with it. Seems weird tho that just my system drive would fail from dirty power when i have 7 drives and 7 cards. I also notice a weird hum comming from my subwoffer from my Boston Digital Media theater that was not present at my old office. any insights on these seemingly weird power problems?

A poor ground, but on my home APC unit I have a red LED on the power connector to indicate if there is a poor ground or not. Also, an undersized/overloaded circuit could be causing you power dips and making the UPS go into protection mode (would be accompanied by a lot of relay clicking from the unit). You could check to see how many rooms run off the same circuit, and evaluate the need to redo the existing breaker panel and beef up the juice to that one room.

i format, well, at least one a month, sometimes more, just ebcause i install so many apps to try out and stuff,a nd experiement.

i can back up my system in about 20 mins..lol and i make a cd or 2 or 3, most of them have the same things on em, with a few enw files. so i am all set!

but yeah, thnx for the heads up, the SECOND my comp doew not feel like it is running right, BAM! back up time! i mean what is a $0.30 CD and 8 mins of my time, as opposed to losing everything i got!

I use like 4 backups, CD, 4 hard drives.

i use ghost and a DVD+rw burner.

make a ghost image of my main drive on another HD from a DOS boot disk then burn that image to dvd in windows.
after a HD failure it takes me about 5 minutes to recover.

Well this dumbass here decides to reinstall everything, since I just got an New Apt, and my computer from storage.... Anyway Everything is going fine till I put the Office XP CD in and during the middle of the install I hear this weird noise from the DVD player.


My CD broke in half.


No clue what caused it. Maybe the movers stepped on it.

Costs me 28 bucks to get a replacement.

You would think with all the backups I made I could have made a Backup CD of my most expensive Software.

I have images of all the software that i use
it installs much faster off the hard drive
and swapping cds is a matter of clicks.

3 words:

CloneCD

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