[OT] Friendly warning - BACK UP TODAY!

R

Richard Heathfield

I had a narrow escape this morning.

For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

For the last few weeks I've occasionally had a little niggling thought -
"backing up would be a good idea at some point" - but I never actually got
around to it.

Fortunately, a little gefingerpoken recovered the box.

I have spent the afternoon backing up onto as many different media as I can
find!

Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle happily
at my panic, of course.

But for those of you who, like me, keep forgetting about the last disaster
and keep thinking "well, obviously there won't be a disaster *today*, so I
can put off backing up until *tomorrow*..." - think again!

I know it's completely OT, but if I can guilt even one person into backing
up before it's too late...
 
F

Frederick Gotham

Richard Heathfield posted:
Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle
happily at my panic, of course.


Reminds me of a little episode I had a few years ago...

My family computer had a 1GB hard disk (which was big at the time)
partitioned thrice -- one for Windows, one for Programs, and one for Data.
My father had all sorts of data on it pertaining to his job.

With youthful curiosity, I had a partition program open and was looking at
the partitions. I noticed that the latter two had their file system listed
as "FAT32 LE" rather than "FAT32" (or at least I think it said "LE"). I
changed them to "FAT32" and rebooted the system.

c:\> d:

Unknown command or filename

c:\> e:

Unknown command or filename

A mild, stale kind of panic set in. I went back into the partition program
and changed them back to "FAT 32 LE".

Rebooted the system and thankfully all was well again -- took a nice big
deep exhale.
 
C

Christopher Benson-Manica

Richard Heathfield said:
For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

Clearly if hardware has the audacity to threaten *your* work, the data
of mere mortals such as myself is in grave and constant danger. The
warning is appreciated :)
 
J

jacob navia

Richard said:
I had a narrow escape this morning.

For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

For the last few weeks I've occasionally had a little niggling thought -
"backing up would be a good idea at some point" - but I never actually got
around to it.

Fortunately, a little gefingerpoken recovered the box.

I have spent the afternoon backing up onto as many different media as I can
find!

Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle happily
at my panic, of course.

But for those of you who, like me, keep forgetting about the last disaster
and keep thinking "well, obviously there won't be a disaster *today*, so I
can put off backing up until *tomorrow*..." - think again!

I know it's completely OT, but if I can guilt even one person into backing
up before it's too late...

I lost a hard disk drive last week.

I think the heat wave doesn't do to sensitive electronics and
specially to hard disks any good. In general, each time there
is a heat wave I see a LOT of equipment failures, not only
at home but all over the place.
 
D

David Resnick

Richard said:
I know it's completely OT, but if I can guilt even one person into backing
up before it's too late...

My wakeup call as when my machine was stolen in grad school... Much
better than backing up is coming up with an automated backup strategy.
I currently use ghost to make a complete image of my internal drive
every month with incremental images daily to an external hard drive.
Mind you, having another for off site backup would be desirable but for
personal stuff not worth it IMHO. But the best part is that once
scheduled it is all automatic. Lowering the amount of manual work
makes backing up actually happen!

-David
 
T

Tom St Denis

jacob said:
I lost a hard disk drive last week.

I think the heat wave doesn't do to sensitive electronics and
specially to hard disks any good. In general, each time there
is a heat wave I see a LOT of equipment failures, not only
at home but all over the place.

Here's the solution that works well [if you have the space and don't
mind the funny looks you'll get]

1. Take a side off the case, ideally the side that faces the front side
of the board

2. Go to Walmart, Zellers, Kmart, Target, Home Depot, Monoprix,
whatever, and get a 12" (30cm) desk fan

3. Point fan at open case

4. Turn fan on

5. Watch computer temp drop.

I have four SATA drives in my box and two Opteron 285s as well as 6 1GB
DIMMs. Without a fan the case gets fairly hot [but manageable] with
the fan it stays really cool.

So for the price of a stupid desk fan you can cool your expensive
hardware.

:)

Tom
 
A

Al Balmer

I had a narrow escape this morning.

For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

For the last few weeks I've occasionally had a little niggling thought -
"backing up would be a good idea at some point" - but I never actually got
around to it.

Fortunately, a little gefingerpoken recovered the box.

I have spent the afternoon backing up onto as many different media as I can
find!

Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle happily
at my panic, of course.

Of course <g>. On Windows, one of my favorite programs is Beyond
Compare. On Unix, my workspaces are on mirrored drives, though I do a
tar.gz to a removable media once in a while.
 
A

Al Balmer

jacob said:
I lost a hard disk drive last week.

I think the heat wave doesn't do to sensitive electronics and
specially to hard disks any good. In general, each time there
is a heat wave I see a LOT of equipment failures, not only
at home but all over the place.

Here's the solution that works well [if you have the space and don't
mind the funny looks you'll get]

1. Take a side off the case, ideally the side that faces the front side
of the board

2. Go to Walmart, Zellers, Kmart, Target, Home Depot, Monoprix,
whatever, and get a 12" (30cm) desk fan

3. Point fan at open case

4. Turn fan on

5. Watch computer temp drop.

I have four SATA drives in my box and two Opteron 285s as well as 6 1GB
DIMMs. Without a fan the case gets fairly hot [but manageable] with
the fan it stays really cool.

So for the price of a stupid desk fan you can cool your expensive
hardware.
This is sort of like optimizing your programs - *measure*! I have an
Itanium in the server room that would melt within minutes if I did
that. A well-designed computer should have well-designed cooling, and
sometimes it's better not to get in its way.
 
P

patrik.weibull

Yeah, that's why I have my source code in a CVS repository on a server
with raided disks.
 
D

David Resnick

Kevin said:
Make sure your backup is not just on another partition of the
same drive, or even a zip file on the same partition. I've had
several frantic requests to "recover" such data from dead drives.
Usually it's a lost cause (waste of your time), unless you
send them to one of those expensive recovery services.

Yep, as I said, to an external drive. Mind you, a fire or a good
lightning bolt could take both out, so I'm not totally secure there...

-David
 
B

Ben Pfaff

Yeah, that's why I have my source code in a CVS repository on a server
with raided disks.

RAID and backup serve different purposes. RAID saves you from
occasional, uncorrelated disk failure. Backup saves you when you
accidentally delete all your files, or when someone breaks in and
intentionally deletes all of them.
 
I

Ian Collins

Al said:
On 11 Aug 2006 11:49:27 -0700, "Tom St Denis" <[email protected]>
wrote:

This is sort of like optimizing your programs - *measure*! I have an
Itanium in the server room that would melt within minutes if I did
that.
Look after it well, it will have great novelty value in the future :)
 
J

jmcgill

People will get overwhelmed by the volume of data they accumulate, and
consequently give up on the idea of making backups entirely.

The data that I'd go into debt, or go to jail, if I lost, fits on the
smallest of media.

The written material I have personally generated in my entire life, is
dwarfed by the capacity of a CDR.

I'm a music composer and I have significant amount of audio recordings.
As sheet music, it fits comfortably within "the written material"
above. As audio data, it would be no more than a small portfolio of
DVDRs. (As it happens, it's a fairly cumbersome collection of various
media items, since my career spans the period from before the cassette
tape to the post-digital era.)

That is not to say that I do not have a huge volume of data that is
necessary to back up in my professional life. But everything in that
world is getting snapshotted daily with a really well-maintained, really
expensive system.

I suspect there are people who will lose the couple of kilobytes of info
they *really* need to keep, just because they cannot figure out a good
way to backup their 200 gigabytes or whatever.
 
K

Kevin Handy

David said:
My wakeup call as when my machine was stolen in grad school... Much
better than backing up is coming up with an automated backup strategy.
I currently use ghost to make a complete image of my internal drive
every month with incremental images daily to an external hard drive.
Mind you, having another for off site backup would be desirable but for
personal stuff not worth it IMHO. But the best part is that once
scheduled it is all automatic. Lowering the amount of manual work
makes backing up actually happen!

Make sure your backup is not just on another partition of the
same drive, or even a zip file on the same partition. I've had
several frantic requests to "recover" such data from dead drives.
Usually it's a lost cause (waste of your time), unless you
send them to one of those expensive recovery services.
 
W

websnarf

Richard said:
I had a narrow escape this morning.

For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

For the last few weeks I've occasionally had a little niggling thought -
"backing up would be a good idea at some point" - but I never actually got
around to it.

Fortunately, a little gefingerpoken recovered the box.

I have spent the afternoon backing up onto as many different media as I can
find!

Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle happily
at my panic, of course.

But for those of you who, like me, keep forgetting about the last disaster
and keep thinking "well, obviously there won't be a disaster *today*, so I
can put off backing up until *tomorrow*..." - think again!

Well to be honest, the way I do this, is I creat a heirarchy of
"importance" and I find ways of doing implicit backups as part of what
I am doing.

This maps reasonably well to what I do -- I consider my source code the
most valuable, so I use CVS where the repositories are on a different
drive. So I can lose either drive, and I am not totally screwed. For
certain "high need" directories, I actually make 3 copies onto 3
seperate drives.

As for full backups, I only do this occassionally, as I do not believe
in being a slave to my computer. Computers are virtual slaves -- they
*MUST* do what you want, at your pace, when you want, how you want it.
Where it fails to do this, or it forces *you* to take action you are
not interested in (install/run a virus scanner, physically backing up
your data, cleaning out your registry, etc) your system is simply
failing you. This is a failing system making a decision about the
value your time.

RAID and journalling are important technologies that are slowly
starting to make it into mainstream use. This is clearly the right
answer -- not taking ridiculous time outs to do full backups.

While you might be motivated by a "near escape" -- I had a slightly
different problem. Actual loss. My Win98 install had finally failed
on me in a way that was not realistically recoverable. So I upgraded
to Win 2003 server -- everything seemed to work fine at first, however,
it eventually just *lost* my FAT12 drive, and I actually lost stuff.
 
T

Tom St Denis

Al said:
This is sort of like optimizing your programs - *measure*! I have an
Itanium in the server room that would melt within minutes if I did
that. A well-designed computer should have well-designed cooling, and
sometimes it's better not to get in its way.

On my X2 setup it dropped the temp of the die by about 10C with the
desk fan.

Yeah, I agree if you have to admin 100 boxes that a deskfan is lame and
won't work. But if you worried about your workstation at home and
don't want to spend $100s on case mods you can just use a $10 desk fan.

Of course none of our collective advice matters if you don't apply the
thermal paste properly and use a decent heatsink.

Tom
 
K

Keith Thompson

Tom St Denis said:
jacob said:
I lost a hard disk drive last week.

I think the heat wave doesn't do to sensitive electronics and
specially to hard disks any good. In general, each time there
is a heat wave I see a LOT of equipment failures, not only
at home but all over the place.

Here's the solution that works well [if you have the space and don't
mind the funny looks you'll get]

1. Take a side off the case, ideally the side that faces the front side
of the board

2. Go to Walmart, Zellers, Kmart, Target, Home Depot, Monoprix,
whatever, and get a 12" (30cm) desk fan

3. Point fan at open case

4. Turn fan on

5. Watch computer temp drop.

I have four SATA drives in my box and two Opteron 285s as well as 6 1GB
DIMMs. Without a fan the case gets fairly hot [but manageable] with
the fan it stays really cool.

So for the price of a stupid desk fan you can cool your expensive
hardware.

Be sure you know what you're doing before following this advice. I'm
not saying it's wrong (Tom likely knows more about this stuff than I
do), but my vague understanding is that computer cases are designed to
circulate air properly over the parts that need cooling, and opening
up the case and blowing a big fan into it bypasses this design, and
might happen to miss some components.

I presume Tom isn't offering to reimburse you if you follow his advice
and it fails.
 
T

Tom St Denis

Keith said:
Be sure you know what you're doing before following this advice. I'm
not saying it's wrong (Tom likely knows more about this stuff than I
do), but my vague understanding is that computer cases are designed to
circulate air properly over the parts that need cooling, and opening
up the case and blowing a big fan into it bypasses this design, and
might happen to miss some components.

I presume Tom isn't offering to reimburse you if you follow his advice
and it fails.

Most cases [e.g. desktop, or vertical server] are NOT designed with
this in mind. My Antec Titan 550 is a server case and it most
certainly does not have sufficient airflow over the inside. Plus with
all the cables and what not unless you have ducts in your case you
won't get proper airflow.

For rackmount stuff you ever wonder why they're loud? Lots of airflow
with tiny fans. Though rackmount gear usually is packed well so the
air does indeed flow through the case. But if you don't want to hear a
75dB fan blowing in your case a deskfan works well. Try it with a
program like Asus Probe or lm_sensors. Get your cpu/mb temp then open
the case and put a fan on it. In many of my AMD and Intel boxes this
reduces the CPU temp by 10C or so at idle.

What most people forget is that just because your case fan CAN pump X
CFM of air doesn't mean it is. If your case is not well organized.
Ideally if you want to go the case fan route cable tie all your cables
together and toss them in an empty 3.5 or 5.25 bay. Make sure you have
two fans in the back and at least one in the front. As always check
the CPU temp to make sure you're actually cooling the thing.

Another upside of the desk fan approach is there are no pockets. If
you feel inside a case there is usually a pocket of air between the
front and the PSU of hot air. It's hard for case fans to blow there
(because the PSU is in the way) and this is where most CPU heat is
dumped. If you can't vacate that pocket the CPU can't cool down (it
can't radiate heat from the heatsink which in turn means the CPU can't
dump heat into the heatsink).

At any rate, it's just a suggestion. It hasn't failed me yet (it's
what I used to keep those damn K7s working proper) and it's a really
cheap solution. Simply put, desk fans have a way higher CFM than some
noisy 80mm case fan. Do the math.

Tom
 
R

Richard Tobin

Richard Heathfield said:
For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure.

Well that's your mistake. Don't do years of work.

-- Richard
 
E

Eric Sosman

[...]
RAID and journalling are important technologies that are slowly
starting to make it into mainstream use. This is clearly the right
answer -- not taking ridiculous time outs to do full backups.

As Ben Pfaff observed, data integrity measures and
backup measures counter different kinds of threats.

What works for my peace of mind is to burn a DVD of
my files every week or two, and to put every third or
fourth one into my safe-deposit box at the bank. If my
computer is physically destroyed by fire, or stolen by
drug addicts, or if one of those encrypting ransom
viruses gets to it, I may be back at Square One but I
won't be back at Square INT_MIN.

The bank's only about three blocks from my house,
so my data protection isn't perfect. One small nuclear
weapon or one medium-sized conventional bomb would nail
both my computer and my safe-deposit box, and then where
would I be (if not atomized)? But if they start flinging
that kind of military hardware around the neighborhood,
losing my TurboTax records probably won't be my #1 worry.
 

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