So here's the flip side of the story that we heard from Ted last year (it was Ted wasn't it?) Ted don't read this, you will hate me.

I had an automatic backup system set up on my home computer -- dual 60 G hard drives that took turns creating a backup image of one on the other. The E: drive had the OS and programs and most data, and the D: drive was mostly archived files and the main backup site. At some point the automatic backup program had stopped creating updates and it became one of those things "I need to get around to fixing." As it turns out it hadn't done a full backup since last February!

So a few weeks ago I encountered a great deal on a 120G portable USB hard drive and decided it would be good to keep a backup of my system in my briefcase in the event the house burned down or a lightning bolt hit my machine. I kept putting it off until yesterday morning when I was hanging around the house feeling lazy and reading UMSF. Ted reminded me in a private disussion about his lost data. That made me think about my system and its need for a recent backup. So I plugged in the portable drive and ran a backup of both hard drives. I checked it out and both backups were good. So I put the portable drive away and didn't think much more of it.

Later in the evening my wife called me in and said, "I don't know what happened. I didn't touch anything. I was just checking my email". And there sat the dreaded blue screen with the message UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. After several attempts at diagnosing the problem I have reached the conclusion that my main drive is in fact as dead as MGS.

Fortunately, the wireless network still works for my wife's laptop so I've been able to to some trouble shooting research this am. Also its one of those semi-holidays here that mainly government employees have off (of which I am one) so I'll have the time to put in a new larger hard drive and the computer stores should be open and uncrowded.

With this kind of luck, I feel the need to go buy a lottery ticket or something like that.

Take this as another lesson everyone. Backup your data if you haven't done so lately. Do it today.

woaw -you got lucky. I've had a physically-crashed harddrive this year (the windows volume). Quite coincidentally I had left some recent images transferred to it from compactflash (a few weeks worth of family pictures). The only option is to send it for repair which will cost me anywhere between 500-5000... So that disk is kept safe until I have some spare cash because I want those pictures....

Anyway, I'm about to purchase a RAID external solution (to use raid1). I began looking into this a few weeks ago and found some products but I'm not sure what I will get.

Western Digital has something called Mybook but it's USB and I doubt the quality of the cooling. (double 500 Gig drives though for 495 )

There's also a real nice all-in-one (raid, fileserver, printserver,...) solution from Synology which I can buy at my local pc-store but it's kinda pricey without the disks at 544...

And then there's SataII, the best, but so far I haven't found any products that seem reliable enough re cooling and rigidity of the casings...

Any pointers are appreciated.

Okay now Dan, I'll start that backup now

Nico

Nico:

I make a point of adding cooling where I can to hard disks, and believe that this - apart from the obvious need to backup - is just about the major bit of preventative action one can take. A word of warning, however - if you decide to cool a hard drive with some sort of third-party fan, then DO NOT power it by running a parasite connector from the hard disk itself. I have twice seen such fans fail and fry the very drive they were there to protect! Instead, take the power (assuming your PSU has the wattage to start with!) from the CD or DVD drive. If they fry, who cares? I have also been known to make air ducts out of heavy paper to guide airflow. My most inventive heat-sink, ever, was a 24-pack of Diet Coke which kept a PC running the tills in a pub up and running over a weekend after the PSU fan went bye-bye - I called it my Apollo 13 moment, although I used brown parcel tape rather than duct tape!

If you're buying an external box for a NAS RAID solution, I'd always specify one with a metal case, for similar temperature control reasons.


Bob Shaw

Thank you for the good advice Bob. I've made sure about the cooling issue you mention in my desktop casing but I'll look into the issue re the external solution I'm after.

quite a story with the diet coke

Nico

I had a scare a couple of months ago after accidentally spilling some tea into my laptop keyboard (ironic that I never did that with a beer). Bought a neat little 60Gb USB drive, which is more than enough for my needs, and replaced the keyboard...good to go!

Unbelievable luck - I'm somewhat lazy with backups (with "lazy" meaning I occasionally might lose 1-2 weeks of work in the event of a crash). I have one reason for laziness though: The amount of data. If all you need is about 100 GB of backup data or less (apparently common in this thread) it's not a big problem but I have about one *terabyte* of data. It's true that not everything needs to be backed up, for example the Voyager 1 & 2 CDs which I keep on my HD for convenience (and which I also have on DVDs), but this is still a lot. For example the directory tree containing everything related to planetary maps (both my own and maps I've downloaded) is probably almost 100 GB (I'm at work so I don't have an exact number).

The next time I get myself a new computer I will probably get myself a RAID.

And one rule: Have a double backup of the stuff that's absolutely critical not to lose. At least one of these should not be stored in the same location as the computer.

Yeah - my rule for MER data is thus.....

The raw downloaded stuff....is on HDD AND on DVD.
The stuff that is generated 'dumb' - i.e. click a bat file and img2png goes off and does it thing..that isn't backed up.
BUT
My colour comps, psd's, PTGUi files etc - they're on DVD as well.

When the shed-office is finished ( getting there ) and I've got the laptop I want (C2D MBP) - then..... a Raid 1, maybe Raid 5 NAS thing is on the shopping list.

Doug

Exactly the same laptop I'm after Doug -hopefully in a few weeks (the 15" version)

Nico