I just want my computer back and reasons to backup

[nealrm]

I'm hoping that this will help someone out there.

I had the harddrive crash on my computer a few days ago. I have to say it did crash very well. Nothing can be written to or read from the drive. (insert a very long stream of cuse and swear words here)

So what did I learn from this:

1) It really is a good idea to create the restore disk when you buy them computer.
2) The Carbonite backup service is worth the price.
3) Reinstalling a upgrade from a scratched DVD can be very problematic.
4) It is worth the price of a second hard drive to mirror the orginal. Then if you have a HD crash, you just pull the bad drive out, put in a replacement and keep going. No reinstalling, very little downtime.
5) They don't put enough of the new style HD power connector in most computers.
6) Finding power adaptors for the new HD power connections is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Everyone needs them but no one selling them. I endup ordering one from China for 50 cents including shipping.


For those of you out there that depend on your computers. Think about this, what would happen if you lost your computer for 48 or 72 hours? Is that worth $60 a year for a backup service and $110 for a second harddrive? If so, look into if your current computer can handle a second drive and RAID mirroring.

[billbenson]

4) It is worth the price of a second hard drive to mirror the orginal. Then if you have a HD crash, you just pull the bad drive out, put in a replacement and keep going. No reinstalling, very little downtime.
5) They don't put enough of the new style HD power connector in most computers.
6) Finding power adaptors for the new HD power connections is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Everyone needs them but no one selling them. I endup ordering one from China for 50 cents including shipping.

4) Be careful on mirroring. If you get a virus or spyware that trashes the drive, it will trash both drives. I used to mirror, but now I just backup regularly to both an external HD and to Disk 2 on my machine.

6) Yes, buy some SATA connectors and adaptors online. I had to pay $20 for one at Best Buy a while back when they are $1 online. Local computer stores really seem to rape your wallet these days. Its very hard to find parts including monitors at a reasonable price locally unless you are in Silicon Valley or somewhere similar.

In addition to what Neal said above, I'll add that I maintain a backup computer so that in the event of a failure, I can continue working. If you rely on your computer for your daily activities its worth it. In most cases, it can just be some cheap computer from craigslist. Most people don't really need lots of power or features on their PC to get by for a few days.

[vangogh]

Sorry to hear about the hardrive crash Neal. It's happened to me before so I know what you're going trough.

Depending on how important the data is there might be ways to recover it. There are people and companies that specialize in restoring data off hard drives in seriously bad shape. They can be expensive though so you have to decide if it's worth it.

Backups are definitely important. I have a couple of backup drives and I'll be getting one or two more in the near future. Macs come with a program called Time Machine which makes backup up quite easy. You turn it on and tell it which drive to back up to and everything else is automatic.

Windows machines don't have anything by default, but there are a host of programs available to backup your data. Once set up they should also be automatic. *nix systems also have backup solutions.

For anyone who's never experienced a hard drive failing don't wait until you do. External hard drives are not expensive. You can find a TB (terabyte = 1,000 GB) hard drive for a $100 if you look around. Some will plug directly into your computer other can be plugged into a network router. Hardly a huge expense and much cheaper than paying someone to recover your data.

There are also a variety of places online that you can backup to. Search "online backup" to find a few. Many will give you a limited amount of free storage and then charge a small monthly fee for more. I think buying a hard drive ends up being the less expensive solution, but online backups do have the advantage of having your data stored away from your home or office and can be accessed from anywhere.

I'll also echo what Bill said about having a backup computer so you can continue working in the event of a crash. That might not be important to everyone, but to those of us who's livelihood depends on a computer it is important. I can't always say I've been great about this, but I do keep my old laptops around just in case. The last time I had a crash I just went out and bought a new laptop since it was time anyway.

Backup, backup, backup. It's not expensive and it's not hard and one day it can really save you a lot of money and aggravation.

[nealrm]

The good thing is that I will lose very little data because I did backup online. (I'll give Carbonite a free plug here) Since the backup is not instantaneously I will lose a few files but only minor items. All my really important files I have setup to save locally and at the same time write a time indexed copy to an external HD. I have Excel, and my accounting programs setup that way.

Bill - You're right. A virus can hit both drive so you still need a backup copy. The advantage of mirroring is that you almost eliminate a computer going down for a drive related hardware issue. If one drive goes down, the computer keeps running as normal. Then when it is convenient you just replace the bad drive and have system recreate the mirror.

[vangogh]

Good to hear that this isn't too catastrophic for you. My very first laptop died after about a year and I lost everything that was on it. At the time none of it was all that important. The one or two important documents were backed up on floppy disks (floppy disks? What are those?).

I didn't learn my lesson though. I had one other computer die on me, though it was the motherboard and not the hard drive. I was able to take out the drive place it in an enclosure and now it serves as a small external hard drive. Even though I didn't lose any data that time, I did learn my lesson and now make sure to back up.

Time Machine is set to back up every hour, but that became annoying since it always slows down my computer. I think it's the way I have my hard drive formatted. I found a free program that let me change it to back up only once a day. Worst case now is I'd lose whatever I added or changed on that day, which wouldn't be too bad. The next drive I'll format a little differently and see if that speeds the process up and I'll back up more often.

[billbenson]

While on the subject, there are really two types of backups. Disk images and file backups. They both have a place. file backups take the data in each file such as myspreadsheet.xls and save the file somewhere else. An image backup essentially does a bit for bit backup of a disk and saves it as one compressed file. You can save it on another hard disk on your pc or on a dvd or group of dvd's. The benefit of an image backup is you can do a one click restore of your hard drive including the operating system and all files.

I used to get talked into fixing friends computers every once and a while. I won't do it anymore. You always get accused of loosing a file or something. Anyway, when I rebuilt a computer for someone I always did an image backup, usually to an external HD. That way when they called me 3 months later I could restore their computer to the way it was when I last worked on it with one click. Took about 15 min and they were back in business.

Be aware, however, that a image backup will only work if no hardware has changed. If you change video cards for example, the wrong driver will be there after restoring. It doesn't work machine to machiine either.

[Blessed]

Vangogh - just a note on Mac drives - after multiple problems with drives that were partitioned I don't partition anymore. The computer seems to run much better that way. I'm not sure how you formatted your drive, but thought I would mention my personal experience!

[vangogh]

The problem was the drive had been previously formatted for Windows and wouldn't work unless I reformatted it. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but if I'm remembering correctly I let Time Machine do the reformatting. I won't be doing that next time.

What happens now is instead incrementally backing things up it tries to back up everything meaning the backup doesn't go as far back in time as it could. It's not a big deal since I use it mainly in case of a crash and would only need to restore from the latest backup. In the coming weeks I'll be getting a new drive anyway. This one only plugs into my laptop via USB and I'd prefer one that I can wireless back up to to get rid of an extra wire. A month or so ago I was pricing new hard drives and they've come down in price since the last time I'd looked.

[Dan Furman]

I have a laptop that I keep "off the grid" (in case of a lightning disaster) - it's my general backup, and has enough installed on it that I could continue pretty easily. I backup important stuff every few days. Every now and again, I burn a few DVD's of important stuff and drop them in my safe deposit box.

[vangogh]

Dan you could substitute an external drive for the DVDs. byte for byte the drives cost less. Then you can take the drive to the safe deposit box.

[KristineS]

This is a good thread for me. I don't keep a lot of important stuff on my personal laptop, but I'm starting to migrate more and more that way. I need to back up more frequently. I'm thinking an external drive that I keep in another location might be the way to go.

[Dan Furman]

Dan you could substitute an external drive for the DVDs. byte for byte the drives cost less. Then you can take the drive to the safe deposit box.

I thought about that - the only problem there is I then have to make two trips (to get it, backup, then bring it back.) And I'm too busy (lazy) to do that :)

[billbenson]

I bought a 500G external usb drive at walmart a while back for about $100. The cool thing is its about the size of a cell phone and is powered over the usb. Stick it in your shirt pocket. I want to buy another one to keep at a friends for off prem backup.

[vangogh]

Oh yeah Dan. I get you. With the DVDs you don't have to go pick up the drive before making the backup. I forget that I don't take my drive offsite. I know the common wisdom is to move the backup offsite in case of disaster. Not that it's the right thing to think, but I figure if there is a disaster of that size odds are it's taking me out with the data at which point I'm not sure how important it is to have the data offsite.

[nealrm]

Really the disaster doesn't need to be that big to wipe out both a computer and external if they are both near each other. A fire in your office, water damager due to a storm or broken water pipe or a lightening strike near your house all could easly take out your onsite computers and HDs.

An internet backup service can give you offsite storage for about $60 per year. The service I use backs up files when the computer is not in use, saves multiple versions of the files and does not have a storage limit. There are some down sides. To get everything back will take a few days. However, I did select the most important files for downloading first. I had those back in about 15-30 minutes.

[vangogh]

True. My comment above was meant to be a bit on the joking side. You're absolutely right that it's best to store things offsite. Where things are here any fire or water damage would have to take out a lot to take out both my computers and my drives. And it would likely cause some damage to me as well. If I were to move things offsite I would do it more like Dan though and place things on some drive or dvd, which I would then take to a safe deposit box. I'm not big on the cloud. I don't like the idea of handing over all my data to another company. I know they aren't going to searching through it all or using it, but it does mean I give up some control over the data.

[cbscreative]

I thought about starting a thread very similar to this a while back. As most of you who are regulars here probably know, I'm a backup fanatic. I've never had any major issues with data loss because of that, but I've had issues that could have been catastrophic had I not been so adamant about backup.

If you were paying close enough attention, you might have noticed my activity here faded in mid May and well into June. Here is what I'll add to this discussion because of what I was going through during that time. My computer was slowing down to painful levels over about a two month period so I decided a system recovery would be the only real solution after exhausting my other options.

I've had several occasions where I recovered computers for friends, family, and clients (even for myself once or twice). Although the process has always been somewhat time consuming, it has been generally smooth...until recently. BEWARE, MS recently made "improvements" to the Automatic Updates that causes serious issues doing a recovery on a computer.

I had good backups, so that did not present a problem. The problem was from serious issues trying to do Updates from the MS site. It was as though the Updates site was trying to do everything in random order without verifying that all the proper updates were done in sequential order first. There is a little known process called "slipstream" built into the XP OS that in all my years of tech training, no one ever covered, nor is it very well promoted. If you have to do a recovery, be sure to do a slipstream disk. Otherwise, you will get very frustrated.

Prior to this, I was having serious issues in spite of my meticulous backups. The problems I encountered went from bad to worse, I even lost functionality of my Adobe suite because of a licensing error. I spent several hours over a couple of days with Adobe tech support and couldn't resolve the issues. Only after a second recovery using the slipstream process did I get my computer back to normal. It now works great again.

As others have indicated above, don't play Russian Roulette with data. I have a second drive for backup, and an external for additional protection (TB drives are now below $100). These are the first line of defense, but only work for primary hard drive failure. Without offsite backup, you still have a gaping hole in your backup strategy. Since 80% of businesses fail after serious data loss, that's a huge risk.

If you're using a MS OS like Windows XP, be sure to create a slipstream disk. Do it now. My system was so far gone I couldn't even create the disk when I was having the issues. Had it not been for other computers here to create the disk, I would have been up a certain creek without a paddle.

I'm happy to report that after slipstream and my backups, my computer has been functioning normally. If you don't have good backups, you're taking a huge risk.

[vangogh]

Glad you got your computer working again. Now we know where you disappeared to. What a pain.

One other thought to add is some external drives will let you plug in another external drive. The first can be set to automatically back up to the second, giving you one extra level of protection. This gets back to Dan's point above about using DVDs. You could have one drive as the main backup and plug another one in. Let the second fill up and take it to the safe deposit box and then buy another second drive.

It probably sounds expensive, but it really isn't. Memory as in drives have come down in price a lot over the last couple of years. With the amount of data you can fit on it it's probably less expensive than buying the equivalent amount of space on DVD. The only downside would be more time between trips to the safe deposit box so if something does happen you wouldn't be able to back up to yesterday.

You could even just buy two or three drives and rotate them. One or two at the safe deposit box and the other being used as the backup.

[billbenson]

cb steve - if you had data on disk 2 and os on disk 1, would a ghost image backup system of your os drive have saved you or would using a 6 month old image backup for the os still have left you with these ms update issues?

[nealrm]

How do you do create "slipstream" disk? Is it availble for Windows 7?

[cbscreative]

Bill, I've thought about the disk image before, but I get mixed reviews on how reliable they are. Sure, everything looks great while creating the image(s), but the real test is how it works when you need it. Until this recent experience, a recovery was easy, but time consuming. It's mostly a lot of babysitting as you run all the processes. Because I never had these problems before, I never took the plunge on disk imaging. That and the mixed reports I've encountered on how reliable it is.

I should add that I don't split my drive into OS and data, but if I did, your plan would probably work.

Neal, I've not researched either Vista or W7 on the slipstream process. I took several tech classes at a local university, even studied XP extensively, and I never heard of slipstreaming. But the capability was programmed into XP with its original release. For whatever reason, they've never promoted it. Now that MS has made "improvements" to their Automatic Updates, I would never again recover XP without using slipstream.

Here's a good resource explaining the process:
Slipstream Service Pack 3 into Your Windows XP Installation CD (http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd)

There's also a link to the nLite utility you will need to create a disk.

I will add an additional note based on my experience so far. When you create a slipstream disk, you're supposed to be able to use it instead of your original OS disk. In my case, it didn't work that way. I was getting errors trying to install from the slipstream disk, which was frustrating. What I did was run the original disk, then install from the slipstream disk using the Upgrade option. That process ran perfectly.

Vangogh, yeah it was a pain. It was weird going back to older versions of Adobe and Macromedia software to get my work done while the CS3 wasn't working. You don't realize how much you get used to the newer features until you try to work without them. I was really happy when I did the 2nd recovery and got everything working again.

There's another part of this story I haven't told yet. When I did the first recovery attempt, I anticipated about 2 days to get everything completely back to normal. It was 5 days of pure frustration and no sign of normal after that time either...just functional, not normal. Here's the funny part. I have my laptop which is fully functional to replace my desktop, so I wasn't worried about the downtime. The day after I began the recovery process on my desktop, the power adapter for the laptop died. What timing, eh? That's not something you can just run to Best Buy to replace either, so I had the desktop working again before the new power cord arrived.

You know the expression this will be funny some day...well, I just had to laugh right away because I knew I was in that situation. It gave me something to laugh about to alleviate the frustration I was having with the desktop.

[billbenson]

CB Steve, I used the imaging for years with no failures. The key is to not change the hardware or you will be in driver hell. I'd make an image when I first installed software, only installing software that is unlike to change and after all ms updates at that time. Then ever 3 to 6 months I'd revert back to that to get a clean system. I'd have to reload any software that was not on the image file. Still a lot faster than starting from scratch. I never had an image fail to work.

I'm now on Linux and haven't done this in a few years now.

[cbscreative]

I was about ready to switch to Linux myself, but I have to wonder about compatibility of some of my software and hardware.

The no change in hardware would be a definite issue for me. I seem to regularly find ways to upgrade hardware to gain a performance boost or add something. My main computer is now at its outer limits though. The next upgrade will be the computer itself, and I'll retire this one to other uses because there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Everything I have now runs smooth, but when I do my next round of software upgrades, it will be more worthwhile if I also have a new computer to run it on.

[billbenson]

What you might try if you are thinking about Linux is a dual boot machine. The problem with that is you kind of need to jump in with both feet or you won't do it. I'm still not to good with Linux, but thats because I only figure out what I need to know now because of time constraints. Its definitely more of a task to set up the pc, but I have no intention of going back to MS. So setup is harder, but the product is much better IMO. I use the SUSE distro.

Wine is a Linux app that allows you to run windows applications. I hear it works well, but no experience with it. I'd do some searching on forums.

If you build or buy a machine with the intents of a 64b os; get a lot of memory. I'm pretty sure this would be true with with windows or Linux, stick a lot of memory in it. I frequently have a lot of windows / apps open. With 4G I had a lot of crashes. I built a new machine with 12G RAM. I can go weeks without a reboot. Overkill, maybe. I built it with the idea of a 5 year lifespan. I bought it piecepart from Tigerdirect.com cost about $1600. Once you go over 4 G in RAM, the motherboards get expensive, might as well put a decent processor in there, big PS, presto you are spending $1600. But its your livelyhood. I'm happy.

If you decide to go that route, make a post. I just built my new pc in Feb. I've been on Linux for 2 years now (although I don't know it that well).

[martin65]

There are many ways to backup data on your computer - the least effective of which (for obvious reasons) is having the only backup location on your actual hard drive. Instead, use external hardware such as a disk, CD, zip drive, or memory stick.

Online backup is another option. This requires the use of an Internet-based data backup storage service.