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
Keith - Administrator
Was it for me Boss
to loved and beloved is the greatest joy on earth...
Over 90% of folk don't make backups and then moan wwhen they lose data!Originally Posted by Mrs Daddy
Was it for me Boss
Keith - Administrator
Not experience that and hope never willOver 90% of folk don't make backups and then moan wwhen they lose data!
to loved and beloved is the greatest joy on earth...
All hard drives will fail at some point. They only designed to last 5 years but can fail in less than a year.Not experience that and hope never will
Keith - Administrator
The problem Boss is us majority of girls are not a computer geek like you arewe simply rely heavily on technician and Am lucky myself I have got a step son in law who do all pc problems for me
to loved and beloved is the greatest joy on earth...
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.
Don't make promises when you are in JOY. Don't reply when you are SAD.
Don't take decisions when you are ANGRY. Think twice, Act wise. BE happy.
Not too old to be spanked
Keith - Administrator
Guilty as charged, i will do that as soon as my computer work again
Thanks Boss
It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good to check up once in a while to make sure you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.
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.The problem Boss is us majority of girls are not a computer geek like you are
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
i've worked at a couple of small companies that didn't regularly back up their data
programs can be easily replaced, data like your accounts, pictures,chat logs cannot be
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
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
i see things have moved on slightly since the days I learnt cobol
and i couldn't get my head around object programming, harder when you learnt structured programming techniques like jsp. - thou probably good for visual basic
as for sql,
as for the rest, you've lost me
assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor
wish i stuck at it, how i miss the days of 3.5k of ram to use
thou i always wanted to learn and use C#
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 systemsThat's going back a bit!
Keith - Administrator
My colleagues still use a dialect of Cobol a lot of my stuff is built around their core Cobol ERP system, I added Document Management, Radio Frequency Barcode scanners etc.i see things have moved on slightly since the days I learnt cobol
and i couldn't get my head around object programming, harder when you learnt structured programming techniques like jsp. - thou probably good for visual basic
as for sql,
as for the rest, you've lost me
assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor
wish i stuck at it, how i miss the days of 3.5k of ram to use
thou i always wanted to learn and use C#
I've never really coded in assembler although oddly enough I dug out one of my books on assembly language last night
As you say just you and the processor but you have to know the processor intimately
As for SQL, I bet you worked with normalised data all the time matebut I know what you mean.
WPF = scale independant vector graphics user interface for line of business apps, you get to use the graphics processor at something more than 0.1% of it's capability.
WCF = Microsoft's latest attempt to implement a multi-tier architecture it basically provides yet another way of doing remote procedure calls. This time over the web.
WPF + WCF = Presentation separated from business logic separated from database.
Until recently VB was a pseudo object language that was partly why I hated it , the other reason was it was just to easy to shoot yourself in the foot using VB
Object orientation is just good practice not that different from structured techniques, once you get your head round the idea of "object instances" i.e. discrete block of data with code that acts on that block of data, it all gets pretty simple. Lots of old Cobol coders used to use techniques that were as close as you could get to object programming in a procedural language it was natural to them, they were really not that far removed from the modern programming world.
Amazing when you think back, whole operating systems running in a few kilobytes in the old days
Also amazing is the fact that almost all the new stuff that is coming out now is a rehash of stuff that was done long long ago on a faraway mainframe, very little is really ground breaking in modern computing
Jim
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 whereThank God for PHP
Keith - Administrator
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.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
Your point about the web is one of the main reasons I hate web development these days
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
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...
I've still got a rair black box, cpm puter from about 1980, i've not turned it on since about 1981 - its got a 5mb hddI used to use Prolog in the 80's, and machine code on CPM systems
The boards on this model would sometimes come free from the mother board during transit. The engineer would arrive from Rair, wait for the client to leave the room, and then simply drop the computer from about two inches off the desk to re-install the system.
http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=454
yes 8085 processor.
i knew and still know the 6502 and z80 instruction set more intimately than the misses and thats more than 25yrs agoI've never really coded in assembler although oddly enough I dug out one of my books on assembly language last night
As you say just you and the processor but you have to know the processor intimately
As for SQL, I bet you worked with normalised data all the time mate
sql theory is the only thing i took twice and gave up twice on
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.
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
Word MS are waking up theres another product I was shown a while back (ok a few weeks ago but time flies) which once i recall what it is i will mention on here because at the time i thought not for us but be handy possibly for peeps on fil uk.
Had my fair share of grief with applications recentlyone in particular where the databases and servers are in the US. Application designed and mainly created in Japan along with third parties doing outsource worked in other places while the core market at the moment is the UK then Europe and onwards. Headaches galore but hey I got to do a bit of flying Sitting on a plane no phone, no emails just abook or a kip while being paid is the life
The various Programing teams live in a dream world it seems
Back to back ups.
HDD's in my experience have more issues if you dont shut sdown correctly of course back up but always shutdown any hardware based device.
They frustrate me now days as my laptops are all solid state so almost forget often when suddenly confronted by a mechnical hdd device.
Oh lord why did you make so many clothes and shoe shops
nope i haven't got a life yet or something better to do, like feed the dog
xp on my pc got really, first time in nearly 2 yrs
when i loggoed in, it logged straight out
so i had to in the end replace the s/w hive with an older one
could login, most stuff appeared to work ok, messenger and azuerus , but firefox or IE wsouldn't, tired loads of fixes etc, service packs, etc. could not get it to work.
so
i've got 70gb extra free now, 70gb worth of kids games which have been installed over 2yrs are gone
works great now
lost nothing but the time it took to re-install xp and the utils.
my misses had more than 6gb of photos on it
Glad you got it back Joe, I hate the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I've had a drive failure or corrupted OS.
nope i haven't got a life yet or something better to do, like feed the dog
xp on my pc got really
when i loggoed in, it logged straight out
so i had to in the end replace the s/w hive with an older one
could login, most stuff appeared to work ok, messenger and azuerus , but firefox or IE wsouldn't, tired loads of fixes etc, service packs, etc. could not get it to work.
so
i've got 70gb extra free now
works great now
lost nothing but the time it took to re-install xp and the utils.
my misses had more than 6gb of photos on it
I've been lucky, I've never really lost anything I have had several major PC failures over the years though and it's the time it eats up trying to get a working system cobbled back together that is the real hassle.
Even setting up a new laptop (my work got me a new one a couple of weeks back) takes me about 6 or 7 hours to get to the point where I have a working Development system.
Just in the process of moving about half a terabyte of data around to make room to consolidate and to backup my photo libraries which come to around 300GB at the moment, trying to avoid having to buy another disk just now.
Jim
oh i've burn't all the photos and cam recordings onto dvds for last few years, thou i'm thinking of getting about a 500gb hdd to copy them all onto, as i've dug out some old data cds from maybe 7yrs ago, the cd coating on the top have faded a bit,even thou they been in a box in the darkGlad you got it back Joe, I hate the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I've had a drive failure or corrupted OS.
I've been lucky, I've never really lost anything I have had several major PC failures over the years though and it's the time it eats up trying to get a working system cobbled back together that is the real hassle.
Even setting up a new laptop (my work got me a new one a couple of weeks back) takes me about 6 or 7 hours to get to the point where I have a working Development system.
Just in the process of moving about half a terabyte of data around to make room to consolidate and to backup my photo libraries which come to around 300GB at the moment, trying to avoid having to buy another disk just now.
Jim
so don't count on being able to read your cds/dvd's in a few years
the only thing i lost were a few docs i didnt really need, i deleted them thinking i had backed them up
Yeah agreed writeable CD/DVD media is not a long term backup solution, I've had this discussion elsewhere as well. Sadly hard drives have limited life too, the only safe backup method is to keep your data on the move and to have it in multiple locations.oh i've burn't all the photos and cam recordings onto dvds for last few years, thou i'm thinking of getting about a 500gb hdd to copy them all onto, as i've dug out some old data cds from maybe 7yrs ago, the cd coating on the top have faded a bit,even thou they been in a box in the dark
so don't count on being able to read your cds/dvd's in a few years
the only thing i lost were a few docs i didnt really need, i deleted them thinking i had backed them up
Photos and Video are a specific problem though because the sheer amount of data can be so large. If you only have a few Gig's worth of pictures then online storage can be a good idea but always keep a local backup as well.
Compact Flash IS a long term storage medium for photos (100 year plus, better than Kodachrome
For photos I try to treat Compact flash as film i.e. once I've used a flash card I buy another one, they are so cheap these days that the per image cost is lower than it was in film/processing days.
Treat your flash memory as your negatives or slides and you will not go wrong you still need hard disk though, because you should always have a copy.
Reasons for Flash drives failing are usually logical rather than physical electrical problems and you can always recover something when it's a logical error. The other reason for failure is excessive use where individual memory addresses on the card get re-written many thousands of times so write once read many is a good approach for them
Ana did a full wash cycle on a 2GB lexar card about 3 years ago
No luck on the lost documents, I really hate losing things like that even if the content is not so important.
Jim
Glad you sorted it as you say sometimes a blessing as you reduce the clutter. I have so many files i keep just in case..oh i've burn't all the photos and cam recordings onto dvds for last few years, thou i'm thinking of getting about a 500gb hdd to copy them all onto, as i've dug out some old data cds from maybe 7yrs ago, the cd coating on the top have faded a bit,even thou they been in a box in the dark
so don't count on being able to read your cds/dvd's in a few years
the only thing i lost were a few docs i didnt really need, i deleted them thinking i had backed them up
Im sure you could get some well made and cared for disks to 75 years in a workable state. Problem would thne be finding a device to read them.
As mentioned before any one got a bbc b laser disk to read the doomsday disks made back in the 80's
If you went back 75 years the various media formats that have been and gone would be huge.
Dat, was it philips digital casste, mini disk, analogue cassette, 8 track, wax cylinder, sinclair microdrive, comdore ealy device disk drives. very laser disks, betamax, VHS, s vhs, zip drives, floppy disk all formats including ones launched only ten years ago like the 120mb drive . Could back up to a cloud I can think of ones which offer 100gb's per person. but companies will come and go over 75 years. Most of these formats the average household would have problems laying their hands on im guessing. Even old HDD formats as we move forward will be complicated for the person in the street to read possibly as OS's develop and change even if they use ibm pc compatiables or apples pass and present.
Best method for many things seems to be a hard copy if photos, diagrams or written word. Books or photos albums might be the best bet.
Oh lord why did you make so many clothes and shoe shops
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