How often do you back up your work to disk?

[WHITE ASH]

dsg

 

[Closet Desire]

A neat trick...

...especially if you have a digital camera and/or use more than one computer to work on.

The little flash cards that digicams use are also ideal replacements for floppy drives. They have capacities from 4M to 512M, readers for desktops and laptops (PCMCIA adapters) are less than £50 (cheaper in the US probably) and they are damn fast. The cards are tiny and the high capacity ones will hold the equal of several hundred floppies.

 

[WildLynx]

Back ups? OH OH

I haven't backed up anything in ages.

In the last 17 years I have never had a hard drive crash. I test it regularly with Norton Utilities... I promise I won't whine about lost data when the drive does finally crash.

I have lost far more data from:

1. Family members doing something dumb. This includes my son and his buddies learning by hacking.
2. Viruses
3. Careless use of DELETE
3. Failure to use "Save As..." when starting a new document, then having MS Windows crash right in the middle of my work.
4. Trusting floppy disks as backups for my work.

UH, I think I just listed 4 reasons I should start backing up my work.

 

[DVS]

Re: Back ups? OH OH

I have lost far more data from:

1. Family members doing something dumb. This includes my son and his buddies learning by hacking.
2. Viruses
3. Careless use of DELETE
3. Failure to use "Save As..." when starting a new document, then having MS Windows crash right in the middle of my work.
4. Trusting floppy disks as backups for my work.

UH, I think I just listed 4 reasons I should start backing up my work.

The first on your list reminds me of the comercial where the little boy puts his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the VCR. Remember that oldie? For you kids out there, the VCR was before the DVD.

Norton will do fine on logical problems with your hard drive. It will not be able to detect physical problems like when a bearing is going out or electronic things like when a drive head is developing a seek problem because some component inside has failed.

A healthy hard drive is usually fairly quiet. It does a little clicking now and then and it has a quiet hum or slightly audible whirling sound. After all, there are parts spinning at 5400 or 7200 revolutions per second in there.

If the bearings are going out that slight whirling sound coming from the hard drive sometimes just gets louder. It can sometimes quit and come back. But if it starts getting louder (you will be able to tell, I'm sure), time to start acting. You will still have a workable drive for a while, sometimes a long while. And, like anything of this sort, when it gets really bad, if you turn it off, it might not want to spin back up again. It will seize up.

Have you ever had a fan that worked fine, and then you turn if off? When you go to turn it back on again, the damn thing just sits there an hums? It's the same sort of thing. The only difference is a fan isn't going around as fast as a hard drive is, so you won't hear the loud whirling. But the heat produced inside is similar and that is why the seizing happens. You can sometimes get the fan to go by spinning the blades. You can't do that with a hard drive.

Loud audible clicking, almost clanking and clunking, is when the heads are messing up. That can happen pretty quickly, because something burned out inside the electronics. Everything still works, but not together like they should, so the heads can't find the perfectly fine data that is there. The clanking and clunking is the heads banging against the side of the drive chamber.

Norton utilities won't help you on these problems. It might help you with symptoms caused by these problems. A drive has to spin at the speed the data was written to it to read it. A bearing problem may cause the drive to spin slower, and Norton will not see it as a slow drive, but as a problem reading data. Unless you can tell by your own hearing that the drive is spinning slower, you will not know any different. There is a chance it will get your attention before the drive gets too slow, even if for the wrong reason.

As for the data heads going out, I don't think there is ever any good way to tell. Just listen for that loud clanking and clunking. Then, don't turn the computer off until you get your stuff backed up. On boot up, if the heads can't find the boot sector, it won't mount the drive. Your data will be there, but you would have to use other ways to get to it.

Sorry for being long winded and a little technical. I just feel these are things we all need to know in this computer age.

Oh, mounting the drive sounds kind of kinky, yes?

 

[WildLynx]

thanks

DVS, thanks for the tech lesson.
I must be old 'cause I do remember that commercial... didn't they also spoon oatmeal into one?

I never gave a thought to the mechanical side of the hard drive problem. I'll bet I'm not the only one either.

Now to find an affordable cd burner; I still do not trust floppies. I have over 400 mb of personal files and photos to protect. Darn.


Kink is good. Who wants to mount the drive first?

 

[Alex De Kok]

Another idea for those of us who don't mind messing about inside our PCs and have more than one of the beasts. It is possible to obtain Ethernet cards quite cheaply. I just purchased a pair, with the twisted (!) cable necessary to join two PCs directly for just under twenty UK pounds. This means that I can not only back up to a separate drive (my main PC has two hard drives) but also to a separate computer. Just a thought.

Alex

 

[Closet Desire]

Even a fast...

...CD burner is slow if you're moving a lot of stuff and you'll only get 500-600 mb on it. I tried using it for a while with some backup software (essential for error correction).

I know it doesn't sound glamorous but a digital tape drive is the best way to go for a full system or even daily partial backups. I use 30 gigabyte Onstream DAT drive for the main server and the other machines on the network. It's a pretty clever unit and can even access a tape like you would a disk (ie. random). It's very fast and can usually back up all daily changes in a couple of minutes.

You'll know it was worth it the first time you find your drive crumbling in your hand as you try to fix it. I haven't had a mechanical hard drive failure in years but I've had Windows become so damaged that the only way back was through purgatory and a reload of software. Less than $200 in the states oughta nab one.

Just a thought...

 

[Alex De Kok]

Further Thoughts

I've been playing about with the 'Scheduled Tasks' facility in Windows (XP in my case). With a two or three line batch file and the use of xcopy, I have now automated my backups. I do a daily backup to my second hard drive (this could be more frequent if desired). I also do a weekly network backup to my second PC, but my batch file wouldn't work (can't work out why) and I use a Perl script instead.

It does ease the mind, rather.

Alex

 

[DVS]

Re: Further Thoughts

To steal a line from inventor Ron Popeil, you can have your own Set It and Forget It backup system. And in the hopes I don't lose some of the 'geek challenged' writers out there, here we go.

I do a daily backup to my second hard drive...I also do a weekly network backup to my second PC,

This was mentioned in an earlier post. If you have two physical drives in your computer or the luxury of an 'in home' network, a simple file copy from one drive to the other would usually work for a backup. It would satisfy the first rule of backups ~ the file should be in two physically independent places. This could also be a copy to your floppy drive, or maybe a rewriteable CD.

The further automation of your backup with the creation of a batch file isn't as difficult as some people think, but I understand how computer processes tend to seem geeky to some.

For those who want to know more, a batch file is nothing more than what you would type at the command line (at your C:\>), in a line by line process and "batched" into one text based file. This file would then need to have a bat extension, so the computer knows it is a batch process.

Then, you could create a shortcut on your desktop so you can double click it when you want to run this file. This would normally be done, right after you did any writing or editing of your work.

Or, with the means to start this process at a specified time, your Set It and Forget It backup process is complete.

As mentioned, Windows has 'Scheduled Tasks' where you can set a time for computer tasks to be automated. Your batch file could be set to run automatically at a specified time. The computer must remain turned on for this to work, but you could then backup your work whenever and as often as you want.

...my batch file wouldn't work (can't work out why) and I use a Perl script instead.Alex

A batch file is very basic, so I don't think your problem would be there. I also don't know if your network is ptp or you have a server, but if ptp, I would check your drive mapping. Peer to peer networks are not seen by batch files in the same way as server networks. Be sure you have the 'copy to computer' mapped from the 'copy from computer'. Once the initial mapping is done, any network copy procedure should be as seamless as if you are copying to another drive in the first computer. But, I am sure Perl will continue to suffice just fine, too.

 

[Alex De Kok]

Thank you DVS

It was the network drive mapping which was at fault. Following your suggestion has sorted it. Thanks again,

Alex