Topic: A word in your shell like...

[Karl]

Yesterday at about 1000 GMT my pc crashed. It started to make a clicking sound from somewhere inside. When I rebooted it was a black screen saying "unable to find operating system".

If any of you have not backed up your work, do so. Make it your next project. When I first went on a computer course in the early 1990's the advice that they gave was Save Save Save and that still holds true today but I know lots of people who don't. I've got friends who lost all their family pics of their kids from age 2-7 when it happened to them. My mum went on a digital photography course recently and the tutor said that he was glad that all the earliest photos were on film as they wouldn't have made it 100 years if they were digital beacause too few save their work properly.

Me. well I saved most of my images to an external hard drive and have some CDRWs but nothing from this year. And all the software will have to be reloaded and my website is lost which is extremely annoying as I was just ready to update it. 

Despite all the hassle I can remain reasonably calm because

I USE FILM   

[david b]

Good advice - storage space is cheap these days, so no excuses!

I was thinking about the digital photos being lost thing recently - my dad got in touch with some old school friends and wanted me to scan some family photos in b&w from the early 1950s.  And, wow, they look really great - which is a bit depressing as a) most of our generation's snaps will not survive, and b) a lot of the ones that do won't look half as nice as these.  A lot of the day-to-day film stuff that has been shot over the past decade will have been with disposable cameras too, which are often of astonishingly poor quality...

[Francois]

Yesterday at about 1000 GMT my PC crashed. It started to make a clicking sound from somewhere inside. When I rebooted it was a black screen saying "unable to find operating system".

Yep... drives fail. And most people don't know about this fact until it is too late... (I don't like to trust my data to a merry-go-round )
I know a guy who lost 5 years of baby pictures on his Laptop. Lets just say he was crying more than a newborn!

The clicking sound is most often due to a drive head that failed and is either banging on the casing or (the worse case) scratching the disk's surface. I'm surprised the computer's SMART feature didn't give you a warning of the impending failure.

Now, for being the computer geek that I am, I have a few sources that will help you in some way. Help spread the knowledge as I'm getting tired having to say the same things over and over...

A noisy crashed drive is not necessarily lost forever. There is a company called DriveSavers who specialize in restoring data from very damaged drives (even ones that have been through fire). They move the platters that contain data to a new casing and copy the contents to a brand new drive. The service is expensive but for priceless pictures, it's worth every penny.

Option No. 2 is to get a computer with RAID ports on the board (or a RAID mobile rack adapter). In this case, there are 2 identical drives with the same data on both. If one fails, the other one keeps on working. It's what they use on big servers.

But that won't protect you in case of Operating System Failure, something which can be even more scary. You know the drive turns, it's just that Windows refuses to start. This has happened to me and the tech support guys all told me to reformat, something I really didn't want to do! After spending 3 nights up, a friend discovered the Ultimate Boot CD for Win. It's a free download and you need a working system to build the disk. But once this is done, all you have to do is boot from the built CD to access a mini version of Windows XP which is equipped with a ton and a half of tools to get you out of the worse situations! A highly recommended download. It got me out of a rut and can help anyone.

Last but not least, as you said, DO YOUR BACKUPS!
After the near crash incident, I decided to fix things for good. I bought an external USB Hard Disk. There are 2 possible things to do: copy your documents to the new drive or mirror the whole disk. I like to use mirroring software as it makes recovery much easier. I do a full disk image once a month (after I put in the month's Microsoft patches) using Acronis TrueImage. Expensive but worth every penny. Norton Ghost is also a good solution. There are also cheaper alternatives (even freeware on the Ultimate boot CD) that will clone disks. That can also be worth looking into since it is the easiest and safest thing to do. Once the image is done, I shut down the external device so it doesn't wear out.

Don't put all your hopes only on CD's and DVD's... they don't last for long. I've had CD's that I burned a few years ago which are starting to get hard to read... And I've had a DVD stay readable for only 2 weeks! scary.

As they said in an article on "digital image preservation", to put the most chances on your side, do the following:

• Copy the images to an external hard disk
• Once the disk is full, copy everything to DVD's twice, from 2 spindles of two different manufacturers.
• Store the DVD's in a bank vault protected against fire.
• Store the hard disk in a fire safe.
• When you get a new computer, re-copy everything to more recent media. Formats change, make sure you will still be able to read your images in the future.

And that's why I stuck to film. Easy do shoot, easy to store, lasts forever, no updates are ever required. I hope that this lengthy reply will help people... I hate seeing people compute irresponsibly. If ignorance is bliss, knowledge is power.

[FrankB]

One thought -

Yes, do your backups. And periodically TEST those backups.

A backup that you can't restore is actually worse than no backup at all, as it leaves you with a false feeling of security...!

All the best,

Frank (IT Test Manager - Can't tell can you?! )

[Francois]

All my backups are always done with the "validate" check on

Francois (Mr. Computer Repairman... and when I think I didn't even study computers)

[FrankB]

All my backups are always done with the "validate" check on

Francois (Mr. Computer Repairman... and when I think I didn't even study computers)

My post wasn't a dig, AO. Apologies if it seemed like it. Likewise the inclusion of my job was a dig at me rather than a claim of higher knowledge - the damn role has made me even more paranoid than I was before! 

And in the spirit of true paranoia...!

Validate checks are very good - they give a pretty accurate indication that the data has been written away accurately. As I'm exceptionally paranoid I also periodically check that I can restore and then access the data. Occasionally a funny does creep in and this lets me resolve it for future backups. Whether anyone else would find this worthwhile is up to them - it's probably most of use for Test Mgrs and the rest of the mentally disturbed! 

Other stuff for general consumption -

If you don't take a full disk image, do make sure you're getting all your important data. Not everything always gets saved in the My Documents hierarchy (Email folders? Saved games? Configuration settings?). Take a stroll through your programs and see where each saves away its data. Most will be under My Documents, but there's often the odd one...

Likewise - have you got a full install set of all your most used software? If not, the disk image route would probably be worth consideration.

How often should you back up? Personal choice. Depends on how often you use your machine, how much the data changes, how valuable the data is... Ask yourself, "How much would it hurt if I lost my hard disk right this second?" If the answer is, "Not much" then you're about right.

Should you overwrite your last backup with this one? Er, I'd really try to avoid it if at all possible! As David says, disk space is cheap. I'd suggest at least having three backup media sets (or folders on an external HD) - Grandfather gets written to first, then Father, then Son, then Grandfather again. If you go the external HD route then taking a DVD or CD copy every time you get to Grandfather would also be an idea.

All this stuff is old news. Nothing new, exciting or ground-breaking (and I don't mean to imply that it is). However, I bet not many of the PC / Mac owning digi-snapping public actually do it! 

[Ed Wenn]

Just out of interest how many of us on this board work in the IT industry? It seems there are quite a few of us. I've been an email geek/consultant for longer than I care to mention and I know Skorj works in IT too - actually in a field which is the 'meta-version' of this little conversation that we're having here about protecting your home data. So Frank and Francois are both geeks too. Anyone else?

....and in closing, I read somewhere that once you take a whole load of factors into account; film is easily the cheapest and most reliable archive format available for images. Makes me think that people who have put some serious investment into their digital photography may end up having to create negs of their most important work just to make sure that it survives for the next tens of years.

Looking at the long-term options, the reliable life-span of a CD/DVD is reckoned to be around 10 years (although this may change) and if you back everything off onto a hard disk (of any sort) you'll need to make sure that it gets spun up regularly otherwise it'll stop working. In fact the more you look into this area the more mind-boggling it becomes. I would hate to be a serious photographer using only digital and trying to decide how best to save my work for posterity in it's basic form (i.e. as a 'negative' equivalent).

[kuru]

Net/Sys Admin here. Mainly Solaris/Linux, but also do Windows and OS X support.

[LT]

So Frank and Francois are both geeks too. Anyone else?

I'm a geek, but that has nothing to do with my job

BTW - I'll offically have no job in 9 weeks - will that make me a slacker as well as a waster too? cant wait

[Francois]

Yep, as I say, I'm a geek and proud of it!
Strangely, everybody I know comes knocking at my door when their computer crashes big time yet I never really worked in computers... nor have I studied in that field!

I mostly fix XP machines nowadays, though I have been rebuilding systems from the days of Win3.11 (my first computer was a Vic-20... no fixing required!)
I've also fixed the older macs (system 7 in the old days), built Linux print servers and a few other things...

Currently, I too am out of work and am trying to make my way into the public sector. Working for government can't be that bad. Salary should be decent... and, from my experience with civil servants, the basic intellectual requirements shouldn't be that high

Just to give you an idea, I have a friend who was born in Ireland. When she got her driver's license, they made a mistake when typing her birth date. She had to get it corrected and they asked for an original birth certificate (as usual). So she wrote to Dublin, they made the papers, mailed them back to her. Once she received the envelope, she went to the office where they manage the drivers licenses and told the lady at the counter her story. When she showed her the birth certificate, the lady pushed it back with her finger telling her "we only accept official birth certificates!" so she told the clerk, "well, this is an official certificate, I was born in Ireland!" and the clerk replied "Oh! I'm sorry m'aam... I didn't know you were born in another province!"...

I never knew Ireland was now a Canadian province! Lets just say, when I manage to get in, I should stay there for a very long time!

[astrobeck]

I married one- does that count? 
He tells me the most common password is actually "password"  !!!


I'm an astro-geek.     
I consult, write a weekly astronomy column, assorted magazine articles, and make telescopes.

[kuru]

I'm an astro-geek.     
I consult, write a weekly astronomy column, assorted magazine articles, and make telescopes.

I run computer systems for a department of astronomers.

[astrobeck]

I'm an astro-geek.     
I consult, write a weekly astronomy column, assorted magazine articles, and make telescopes.

I run computer systems for a department of astronomers.

University or observatory?

[kuru]

University or observatory?

University of Illinois