Backups Backups Backups!!!

[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

[joebloggs]

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, i still cant understand the normal forms of normalization, sql theory most boring subject known to mankind

as for the rest, you've lost me

assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor , the stuff you could do in a few bytes

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#

[JimOttley]

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, i still cant understand the normal forms of normalization, sql theory most boring subject known to mankind

as for the rest, you've lost me

assembly language was my fave, fast and pure, just you and the processor , the stuff you could do in a few bytes

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#

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'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 but 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

[joebloggs]

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

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 hdd

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'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 but I know what you mean.

i knew and still know the 6502 and z80 instruction set more intimately than the misses and thats more than 25yrs ago



sql theory is the only thing i took twice and gave up twice on , some times you need to know when to quit

[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

[somebody]

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 recently one 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.

[joebloggs]

well you've probably not noticed, i've not been on here for a few days

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 , tired many things, created a dummy wgaupdater, scanned it for viruses, safe mode, nothing would work

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 , wiped all of windows off it using mini windows xp, left me data on and reinstalled xp, just finished putting virus scanner/firewall etc back on

i've got 70gb extra free now , 70gb worth of kids games which have been installed over 2yrs are gone

works great now :xxgrinning--00xx3

lost nothing but the time it took to re-install xp and the utils.

my misses had more than 6gb of photos on it

[JimOttley]

well you've probably not noticed, i've not been on here for a few days

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 , tired many things, created a dummy wgaupdater, scanned it for viruses, safe mode, nothing would work

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 , wiped all of windows off it using mini windows xp, left me data on and reinstalled xp, just finished putting virus scanner/firewall etc back on

i've got 70gb extra free now , 70gb worth of kids games which have been installed over 2yrs are gone

works great now :xxgrinning--00xx3

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.

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

[joebloggs]

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.

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 dark , and most of my pc's couldn't read them any more, they are also fairly brittle, 75yr life span
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