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dhoward
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| Posted: December 17 2007 at 21:39 | IP Logged
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Well, figured I'd give everyone a little bit of news...
In the past two weeks, Ive had 3 hard drives die on me. The first to go was the main drive in my HTPC. Luckily, I had recently added a secondary drive and copied all of my saved media to the new drive. Next, the hard drive in my notebook died. Less than a year old too. Other than having to get a new drive and reloading the operating system, not too much trouble since I only use this system to RDP into my development machine.
But now comes the truly horrible part. Last Thursday, my hard drive in the PowerHome development machine crashed. Two weeks since my last backup too  . To make matters even worse, the backup I had made was no good and the last good backup is a month old. I HAVE LOST A MONTH OF POWERHOME DEVELOPMENT!!! I was so devastated that if I lived in a state that had cliffs, Im certain I would have just jumped off of one. Ive been too down to do anything.
The hard drive has been shipped to OnTrack and it's in their cleanroom as I speak. Hopefully tomorrow, I'll have an analysis of what is recoverable. It'll only end up costing anywhere between $500 and $2600. And all because I had become complacent in making my backups. I think Ive developed a couple of new ulcers (that will now make 4 total) from this experience.
Anyways, keeping my fingers crossed that they'll be able to recover my PowerHome development. And from now on, the source code will be on my RAID 5 Terastation AND nightly backups. Also, if anyone has any suggestions on good automated backup software (full, incremental, differential), please post here and let me know.
Thanks,
Dave.
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RedRock
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| Posted: December 17 2007 at 22:08 | IP Logged
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Good luck with data recovery. What a drag.
Remember, you also need off-site backups.
Here's my strategy: I use Second Copy from centered.com. It allows you to make file copies, including keeping changed-file archives for as many iterations as you'd like. Second Copy runs automatically on a schedule I like. It makes copies to other hard drives on my network, and it sends archives to a specific drive/folder on the network. Then, it also makes a copy of the current data on a removable USB/Firewire hard drive. It also copies the archive folder to the removable hard drive. I have about a dozen of these hard drives. My personal preference is to use 3.5" laptop drives in cases that don't require external power (though I'm probably going to outgrow those 120GB drives soon). Those drives are kept in a fireproof safe, and the freshest copy is rotated off-site.
A big advantage to Second Copy is that I don't have to depend on a proprietary format which needs a specific program to access. All backups are live files which can be read with whatever program created them.
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bhlonewolf
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| Posted: December 17 2007 at 22:39 | IP Logged
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This is going to sound funny (or expected) coming from me, but one option is to consider Windows Home Server for this. As a coder I used to use the personal version of SourceGear's excellent Vault product for both versioning and backup, but honestly, it's gotten to the point where I need coordinated backups across all the machines in my data center (err, house). That way, it's off the machine, automatic, etc.
BTW: Really sorry 'bout that. I hope the recovery works out for you. It's not much consolation but I've been there.
Edited by bhlonewolf - December 17 2007 at 22:40
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roussell
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| Posted: December 18 2007 at 08:40 | IP Logged
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I've had really good experiences with Arconis products for local Windows backups. For the really important stuff, I also zip, encrypt, and store on a Google g-mail drive (They're up to 5832 MB now...)
Terry
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nadler
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| Posted: December 18 2007 at 09:00 | IP Logged
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I second Arconis 11. It got about the best reviews around and lets you do automatic differential and/or incremental backups on your schedule. I just started using it though so I have no long term experience. Also the GUI isn't great.
I do relate to your crash (as probably everyone here does). I had my second harddrive failure in 6 months about a month ago. Had to reinstall everything from scratch, lost some but not all data. So I know the pain is real. The other thing I did was switch to harddrives that have 5 year warranties. It's worth the extra cost.
Good luck with your recovery.
Noel
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jeffw_00
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| Posted: December 20 2007 at 12:40 | IP Logged
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That really sucks Dave.
If you want to keep it simple, just do disk-to-disk backups between your machine. Weekly, I use ImageforWindows (from terabyteunlimited.com) for rock-solid image backups. I have a partition just for backups on every machine. So I run IFW to backup the other partitions and put the backups on that partition, and then copy the backup to a different PC and re-verify it there (using IFW verify function). The idea is that only one PC/disk will crash at a time. I also copy to an external USB disk and take it off-site monthly. It's all automated (short DOS scripts).
In between, I use an old copy of WINZIP to make an incrementals and copy it to a different machine as well (I mean, the PCs don't have much else to do between midnight and 6).
here's keeping fingers crossed that they will recover.
A cheap place to get extra disks, USB enclosures, etc is newegg.com. They ship very fast too.
/j
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MrGibbage
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| Posted: December 20 2007 at 21:05 | IP Logged
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mozy for me. Unlimited online storage, automated software that works great. I really like them a lot. I've got over 200gb stored on their servers for $5/month.
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mustangcoupe
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| Posted: December 23 2007 at 15:05 | IP Logged
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bhlonewolf wrote:
This is going to sound funny (or expected) coming from me, but one option is to consider Windows Home Server for this. As a coder I used to use the personal version of SourceGear's excellent Vault product for both versioning and backup, but honestly, it's gotten to the point where I need coordinated backups across all the machines in my data center (err, house). That way, it's off the machine, automatic, etc.
BTW: Really sorry 'bout that. I hope the recovery works out for you. It's not much consolation but I've been there. |
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I was also going to recommend WHS I do the same, both laptops are backed up daily...
Aconis runs at work incremental backups work perfectly...
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Todd Hannemann
HA newbie 
 PowerHome - UPB - ELK
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dhoward
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| Posted: December 30 2007 at 21:37 | IP Logged
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Update...
The drive went to Kroll Ontrack (the "experts" in data recovery). After several days I got the news. Not a single file was recoverable. It was disassembled in their cleanroom and all new parts (heads and motors) replaced but they said the platters were too badly scratched. Needless to say, I was devastated. The only good news out of the experience is that no recovery, no charge. They've sent the drive back and I plan to hook it up to see if I can do anything (go ahead, laugh, but I won't accept it until I see it myself).
In the meantime, Ive been working nearly non-stop on other recovery measures. Using partial backups, notes, source that I had emailed myself, etc., I have recovered the codebase to 11/27/2007 (this is better than what I had which was 11/2/2007). It took 4 days of non-stop work, but I successfully recovered a months worth of work.
What was lost and unrecoverable is the codebase from 11/27/2007 to 12/13/2007. Two weeks worth of data but a lot better than the original 6 weeks. I also lost email from before May of this year to an as yet determined date (I have to go to a previous full disk backup to determine the gap Ive lost). In addition to the recovery, Ive been reloading the development environment, getting the RAID 5 going with automatic backup to a USB drive, as well as off-site storage of backups. Im nearly ready to start development full-steam ahead.
Dave.
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jeffw_00
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| Posted: December 30 2007 at 21:40 | IP Logged
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Sucks, sucks, sucks, Dave - I've been there, and feel really bad for you. Only consolation, based on experience, is that recoding will take less time the second time around. The experience in your head is, fortunately, still there. 8=}
On the other hand, you have no schedule deadlines, so relax a bit, s--t happens to all of us.
/j
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cmhardwick
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| Posted: December 31 2007 at 09:03 | IP Logged
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Absolutely. Enjoy the new year, start fresh and take the time needed. I think in one way or another, we've all been there. Year ago (ok, back in the DOS days hehehe) I was coding away, making great progress, working great ... Leaned back to stretch, kicked the plug and BAM ... lost everything ... what's that saying, Save Early, Save Often? Hadn't heard of it back then lol  . But it was easier the second time around after I recovered from the initial shock and anger (and stopped kicking myself)
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TonyNo
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| Posted: December 31 2007 at 10:58 | IP Logged
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Here's a suggestion from electron over at CocoonTech:
Drobo
Investigating it myself. 
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Dean
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| Posted: December 31 2007 at 22:05 | IP Logged
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Dave,
Sorry to hear about the hard drive crashes. I'll second MrGibbage on Mozy. Nice, inexpensive off-site storage option that you can use by itself or in conjunction with some on-site storage method. If you go with Mozy you can use your own encryption key to ensure Mozy can't get at the data. I think the downside to the $5/month plan is you can't load Mozy on a Windows Server platform (i.e. W2K Advanced Server, Windows Server 2003) and can't backup from network drives.
As for software, I have used NovaBACKUP and Backup Exec to backup to DLT tape drives. Former product was the desktop version, so no backing up Servers. Later product was probably overkill for what I needed.
Now I am actually using a free product called Cobian Backup 8 to backup files from my Windows Server 2003 to an external USB hard drive. Does full, incremental, differential, encryption support, etc. I got tired of all the tape changing.
I still keep my maintenance subscription to NovaBACKUP, I do think it is a great product. I also purchased Image for Window that someone mentioned from Terabyte Unlimited, but I haven't done much with it. I purchased their Image for DOS/Linux and BootIt NG products as well, which I use more. I use Image for DOS a lot to make images of my Windows XP systems. Haven't tried it with Vista or Windows Server.
Well, that's my $0.05 cents on the backup subject.
I hope 2008 is a great year for you and PowerHome.
dhoward wrote:
Also, if anyone has any suggestions on good automated backup software (full, incremental, differential), please post here and let me know.
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gatchel
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| Posted: January 01 2008 at 22:09 | IP Logged
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Dave,
Sorry to hear about your data loss.
Unfortunately it takes an incident like this to prepare for the next incident. I use a RAID setup on my server with a removable drive that get stored in my fire safe.
As for software, I simply use a batch file using xcopy. It has worked good so far.
Good luck with getting things squared away.
Looking foward to that next release of Powerhome
Edited by gatchel - January 01 2008 at 22:10
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eHomeCreations
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| Posted: January 02 2008 at 04:32 | IP Logged
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Ahhh data loss... I have had it happen and once dropped a project I wrote part time after my laptop died. Lost 2 months of code and gave up... aaaahhhh memories!!!!
Point here is not so much where you backup its to remember to BACKUP.
I myself just do x-copies (my src code) and they run twice a day to 2 different machines with a master x-copy running 1 time a week.
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gatchel
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| Posted: January 02 2008 at 20:22 | IP Logged
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Dave,
I just thought of something...you have one of the best HA/Insteon apps that I know of. Why not write a simple little backup program of your own? Maybe you could integrate the functionality into PH and have it run as a backup component to a Home Automation server? I know you probably have a list of things to do on PH alone but you could save several others your headache by including it in your software.
Simple "Check the box" functionality in a directory tree would be all you need.
What do ya think?
Bob
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Topic: I hate computers
