Backups Backups Backups!!!

[KeithD]

How many times do we have to tell folk. It takes a few minutes to setup Second Copy and then it runs automatically in the background.

Leave a pen drive in the usb port at the back, you can get 8GB for about £10 on Ebay, or a 160GB external hard drive for £30.

The last few weeks I have had to deal with a number of computer problems for other people and none keep backups. If you want to lose all your photo's, history, etc, then fine

[Mrs Daddy]

Was it for me Boss

[KeithD]

Was it for me Boss

Over 90% of folk don't make backups and then moan wwhen they lose data!

[Mrs Daddy]

Over 90% of folk don't make backups and then moan wwhen they lose data!

Not experience that and hope never will

[KeithD]

Not experience that and hope never will

All hard drives will fail at some point. They only designed to last 5 years but can fail in less than a year.

[Mrs Daddy]

The problem Boss is us majority of girls are not a computer geek like you are we simply rely heavily on technician and Am lucky myself I have got a step son in law who do all pc problems for me

[IainBusby]

The problem Boss is us majority of girls are not a computer geek like you are we simply rely heavily on technician and Am lucky myself I have got a step son in law who do all pc problems for me

A technician can't really help you if, as Keith says, your hard disk has died, you've lost all of your photos, movie clips, mp3's etc and you haven't made a backup.

[JimOttley]

A technician can't really help you if, as Keith says, your hard disk has died, you've lost all of your photos, movie clips, mp3's etc and you haven't made a backup.

Depends how it died Iain, a dead IDE or SATA interface on the drive can be pretty fatal at least it's not easy to fix, definitely a return to a specialist for a new board assuming the specific board is still available.

On a drive that has bad sectors or a drive that is nearing general physical failure (bad bearing maybe) it will still usually be possible to recover large amounts of your data if you act quickly.

Logical errors like a damaged partition table, damaged MFT's or corrupt boot loader are not usually fatal there are lots of good recovery programs that will find lost partitions, lost files, etc.

My personal favourite is Winhex, if it can be recovered Winhex will get it back but it is not a user friendly program, best left to a specialist (I am not offering anyone any help here, life is too short to specialise in disk recovery folks )

Winhex is quite cheap but as I said it's hard to use and you will usually need a new disk as big as the one you are trying to recover, during recovery never write to the disk you are trying to recover

Keith is absolutely right, always backup, disk space is cheap these days and online space is getting cheaper every few months.



Jim

Jim

[joebloggs]

i've worked at a couple of small companies that didn't regularly back up their data , and soon or later they will wished they had, at one company they lost many months worth of their accounts, so a few of them spent weeks going thru delivery notes and invoices to find who owed them money . most companies would never survive this.

programs can be easily replaced, data like your accounts, pictures,chat logs cannot be so do regular back ups


i think you said you was a s/w developer jim, what languages do you program in ?

[JimOttley]

i think you said you was a s/w developer jim, what languages do you program in ?

Loads Joe

Worked with Clipper and C in the 80's, C++ occasionally but only when I really have to, mostly for embedded stuff in handheld devices like barcode readers or when I have to write special interfaces.

Visual Basic from version 2 onwards, god I hate that language

Something called Visual Objects, nice language but it went nowhere.

Object Pascal i.e. Delphi was my preferred development tool for long time, still supporting a large Delphi code base these days and probably will be for a good long time to come.

Last few years I made the switch to C# and the .NET framework, C# is a very nice language it has all the elegance and expressivness of Delphi's Object Pascal but it's modern, really like it these days.

Now it's often more about knowing technologies than about languages, with .NET you can code in the dialect that you feel comfortable in be it VB, Pascal or C/C++/C# style they all compile down to the same intermediate language.

No these days it's more about technologies, platforms and design patterns things like WPF, Silverlight, WCF, MVC/MVP (Model View Controller/Presenter patterns) .

Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) are the main things I'm working with now.

I do some web development too but it's not really what I enjoy, I much prefer working on Line of Business apps.

On the data side mostly SQL Server these days but I also worked a lot with Oracle and we still use the Btrieve database system now known as Pervasive SQL.

It's all great fun and I do enjoy learning new stuff but sometimes I wish it would all stop changing even just for a little while


Jim

[IainBusby]

Depends how it died Iain, a dead IDE or SATA interface on the drive can be pretty fatal at least it's not easy to fix, definitely a return to a specialist for a new board assuming the specific board is still available.

I have managed to recover a few myself by swapping the board from an identical disk. Where I work we tend to stock the same particular model and size of disk for quite a while and when we upgrade, we keep all the old disks just in case we need to recover an identical one.

We deal with academics, professors etc and for all their cleverness, they quite often complete idiots when it comes to computers. We always advise them to make regular backups of all important data and they all have plenty of space on our data servers which are backed up to tape daily, but our advice seems to fall on deaf ears most of the time.

Iain.

[JimOttley]

We deal with academics, professors etc and for all their cleverness, they quite often complete idiots when it comes to computers. We always advise them to make regular backups of all important data and they all have plenty of space on our data servers which are backed up to tape daily, but our advice seems to fall on deaf ears most of the time.

Iain.

As a coder I put too much effort into writing code to ever take the chance of losing it I've occasionally lost a couple of hours work but never lost anything serious.

These days I am using Microsoft's Live Mesh to sync my code and anything else that is really important to me.

Live mesh is impressive it's still a beta but it's one of a whole slew of products that show that Microsoft has woken up again and is starting to get things right for once.

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx


Jim

[ukgangster]

Also worth considering is an increasing number of online storage websites, for example skydrive from Microsoft or BTDigital Vault. I use an email service that includes file storage, so it has the best of both worlds. The one bonus of online storage is that your files are accessible wherever theres an internet connection. Only downside is the most have a limit of a few GB's (skydrive seems to be the exception - 25Gb), but for a small monthly fee, that can be increased. Some of these services have the facility to automatically upload and update your files on a regular basis.

I never store files on my laptop (apart from music) - they go on a USB drive, then uploaded to online storage once a week.

[LEAHnew]

We'll take note of that...thanks for reminding Dad ooopps Boss

[KeithD]

We'll take note of that...thanks for reminding Dad ooopps Boss

Not too old to be spanked

[tiN]

Guilty as charged, i will do that as soon as my computer work again

Thanks Boss

[KeithD]

It is irrelevant what language is used these days, if it runs through .NET they are all basically the same now.

I used to use Prolog in the 80's, and machine code on CPM systems That's going back a bit!

[JimOttley]

It is irrelevant what language is used these days, if it runs through .NET they are all basically the same now.

Exactly!

[KeithD]

Exactly!

Microsoft's ploy to blend all the programming languages, and if you ask me that's a good thing, look at the mess of the Internet. Languages every bloody where . You have to know about 5 now just to do a decent but basic web page. Thank God for PHP

[JimOttley]

Microsoft's ploy to blend all the programming languages, and if you ask me that's a good thing, look at the mess of the Internet. Languages every bloody where . You have to know about 5 now just to do a decent but basic web page. Thank God for PHP

Yes it is a good thing, there are some types of problems that are better expressed in one particular language rather than another but they all work against the .NET framework these days and the framework is so huge that it's hard to write something that another programmer could not easily read and understand.

Your point about the web is one of the main reasons I hate web development these days html, javascript, css, xmlhttp, flash and that's only the client side rendering then you need your sever side so it's ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, XML and XSL server side as well.

It just never ends :(

HTML 5 looks interesting if it ever gets full cross browser support but I think I may stick to ASP.NET and maybe learn a bit more Silverlight that way at least I get to stick with C# most of the time


Jim

[Florge]

well, i'm OC when it comes to soft copies... so i back-up my files ALL the time.. even send it to my emails.. hehehe...

[KeithD]

Use the free storage sites, you get 5GB on one of them, and store you pics around different suppliers.

Also get hard copies of your main photos, they only cost a few pence at Bonusprint, just in case we get hit with a nuke or solar flare

[joebloggs]

Also get hard copies of your main photos, they only cost a few pence at Bonusprint, just in case we get hit with a nuke or solar flare

yes i could make a nuclear shelter out of all the pics my misses has taken if i printed them all out , also i've got 100s of computer mag from late 70s - early 80's i could use

i dont trust dat tape or any kinda tapes, i think i'll buy a 200gb hdd and keep a copy on dvds.

and of course print them out at work for nowt

oh couldn't use online, i dont want peeps looking at my pics

[JimOttley]

Use the free storage sites, you get 5GB on one of them, and store you pics around different suppliers.

Also get hard copies of your main photos, they only cost a few pence at Bonusprint, just in case we get hit with a nuke or solar flare

I agree but then again the nuke will probably fry your photies anyway

Solar flare is a worry, we need to start building houses as Faraday cages as soon as we can :bangingfisthardontableicon: (I'm half serious Keith I'm not being sarcastic)


Jim

[joebloggs]

your negatives, you could scan them using a tma adaptor
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/f...cname=bps05614

part of my job is testing scanners, sold a couple of ex corp high end business scanners for nearly £1k each in the last few wks

thats brings me on nicely to scanning all your important docs, passports, certs and visas to pdf files, anything important now i make a scan of it to file and to print on a color laser. some of the copies are nearly as good as the orginals

[JimOttley]

your negatives, you could scan them using a tma adaptor
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/f...cname=bps05614

part of my job is testing scanners, sold a couple of ex corp high end business scanners for nearly £1k each in the last few wks

thats brings me on nicely to scanning all your important docs, passports, certs and visas to pdf files, anything important now i make a scan of it to file and to print on a color laser. some of the copies are nearly as good as the orginals

Agreed Joe, I could but I tried already and the time involved is enormous, I have thousands and they range from half plate through 620, 120, 135, 127, 126 formats.

There are always dynamic range issues when scanning photos or negs, you often lose a lot of the subtlety of the original.

I find these days that the best and fastest way to copy documents (and photos) is to use a digital reprographic setup i.e. a good digital camera on a stand with lights and a lens that performs reasonably at close range. But even then I don't have the time I would like to do it all, these are projects for old age and my brother in law has volunteered at least my sister volunteered him


Jim

[fred]

I just found this thread...A bit too late..!!



I never got round to buying the external hard drive Ive been promising myself for so long but forgot about and never backed up my stuff!!
Today I got the black screen of death (as my son described it) at start up.. we tried about ten times but always the black screen..
Ive not had to do this for years but had to get out the recovery disks..(now 4 DVD`s)
I chose the option to reinstall and save data option on my acer recovery management CD 1 disk..
Before,on my old PC this always worked and my stuff was never lost..
This time my old data has gone seriously missing..
What went wrong with the save data mode? Or is it all still hiding somewhere on my PC ? Any ideas where it may be? or am I grasping at straws..
Just a thought.. I only used 2 of the 4 DVD`s to get back my new desktop... I wonder what is on the other 2??

[sars_notd_virus]

I just found this thread...A bit too late..!!




Ive not had to do this for years but had to get out the recovery disks..(now 4 DVD`s)

What went wrong with the save data mode? Or is it all still hiding somewhere on my PC ? Any ideas where it may be? or am I grasping at straws..

I'm sure you can still recover some of your files .... we have some old hard drives and it was completely wiped out and formatted but my husband can still managed to recover some of the important files in it...in windows u can see that theres nothing in there but once you use the special program from Linux , some of your files will be recovered...amazing

[fred]

I'm sure you can still recover some of your files .... we have some old hard drives and it was completely wiped out and formatted but my husband can still managed to recover some of the important files in it...in windows u can see that theres nothing in there but once you use the special program from Linux , some of your files will be recovered...amazing

Thanks Sars..
As it happens my son found all the files that were backed up by Acer recovery management..
Alls well that ends well.

[sars_notd_virus]

Thanks Sars..
As it happens my son found all the files that were backed up by Acer recovery management..
Alls well that ends well.

Thats cool fred
what can we do without our techno and reliable children, they seems to know a lot these days