My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew

On 12/28/2014 8:06 PM, Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


Likely had recalled parts on the drive motherboard. Happens.
Industry is often driven into dangerous deals. Sale price of those
was so marginal due to other companies - fractions of a cent adds up.

I lost a powersupply to the computer with a cap that should not have
been used in a switcher. Quality of our computers is sliding down.
Sad to say. I would not doubt that some manufacturers plan on 5-6 year
life cycles to keep business going. Force us into 'cloud' crap and usb
disk drives at best.

Martin

Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:06:34 -0800, "Lew Hodgett"
wrote:

My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

That depends how you have the power settings in windows set. You can
power the drive down after a set time of not being accessed, as well
as shutting off the monitor, and even powering down the processor, or
hibernate it.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

My last computer ran 24/7 for almost 10 years without any drive
failure. That was Windows 98 upgraded to XP.
Just upgraded ton a brand new Win7 machine and it runs 24/7 as well
(but this one has WS Red hard drives - old one was IBM DTTA 351290
dated Dec 98 , made in Hungary, of all places!!!)
My experience has been running 24/7 can often last longer than being
shut down and restarted as the bearings don't flatspot and stick on
restart. That addresses the mechanical failures - but not the
electronic failures - where power surges from start-up can also
shorten the life of the drive. My computer is on a Powerware Prestige
dual conversion UPS so it gets perfectly clean power all the time.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew

On 12/28/2014 8:06 PM, Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


I save my data on another internal HD and my OS is on a SSHD, Data on HD
backed up immediately to the cloud.

On 12/28/2014 10:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer
crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.


If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you
computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and steals
your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig.
This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data
selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.

What he said. You can get a terabyte drive for under $100, and
most of them come with backup software pre-installed.

In my case, I have two external drives - I keep all my data files
on one (the computer drive just has the OS and applications), and
I periodically just copy all the data files to the other.

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Plus in the case of Apple I would not trust them not to make
my data inaccessible to me if I haven't upgraded to the newest
version of their product/OS.

John

On 12/28/14, 10:45 PM, wrote:



My last computer ran 24/7 for almost 10 years without any drive
failure. That was Windows 98 upgraded to XP.
Just upgraded ton a brand new Win7 machine and it runs 24/7 as well
(but this one has WS Red hard drives - old one was IBM DTTA 351290
dated Dec 98 , made in Hungary, of all places!!!)
My experience has been running 24/7 can often last longer than being
shut down and restarted as the bearings don't flatspot and stick on
restart. That addresses the mechanical failures - but not the
electronic failures - where power surges from start-up can also
shorten the life of the drive. My computer is on a Powerware Prestige
dual conversion UPS so it gets perfectly clean power all the time.


At my work we deal with multiple petabytes (1000 terabytes) of HD
storage. I'm always probing the DM people about which drives they use
and the current 'go-to' drive seems to be the WD yellows. This does
change every few years as some other drive maker figures out a new trick
for longer life.

-BR


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

John McCoy wrote in
:

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO there's an even more
important one: security. I certainly wouldn't store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

Plus in the case of Apple I would not trust them not to make
my data inaccessible to me if I haven't upgraded to the newest
version of their product/OS.

Or, worse, make it accessible to someone else...

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 00:45:38 -0500, clare wrote:

My experience has been running 24/7 can often last longer than being
shut down and restarted as the bearings don't flatspot and stick on
restart.

You took the words right out of my mouth :-).

I regularly remove drives from my old computers before I junk them. It's
surprising how many people sell fairly new computers cheap. They take
out the drives to protect their data and assume nobody wants a computer
with no drives. I bought my last one for $10 and stuffed two of my old
drives in it.

But the industry has reached the point where IDE drives no longer work.
SO I'll have to junk my collection and start anew.

Doug Miller wrote:
John McCoy wrote in
:

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they
are smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO
there's an even more important one: security. I certainly wouldn't
store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

That's my biggest reason for not using cloud based storage. Between the
ongoing issues with credit card fraud (in a system that is inherently more
secure than your typical hosted storage provider), and what we are already
seeing now with cloud storage being hacked, I'm not good at all with
trusting my information to a provider out there somewhere. Security is a
joke and people are becoming too trusing of providers who "assure" the
integrity of their security.

--

-Mike-

"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life cycles.
There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only one-year to
three-year warranties except for the most expensive enterprise-level drives.
I generally keep my computers on a three- to five-year replacement cycle
(three for my work computers, five for a household computer). If a household
computer is running quite trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just
replace the hard drive after five years as a matter of course. Power
supplies I run until I either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need
more power on account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get
noisy when they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is a
two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives, with the
same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily backups of all
document directories are done every night, keeping up to two weeks of daily
backups. Periodically I archive one each of those daily backups onto a large
external hard drive and keep them up to a year. When I had an office
downtown I kept off-site office backups at home, and off-site home backups
at the office. Now that I'm working from my home office I just keep the
off-site backups in a different building on the property. This all sounds
like a lot of work, but once it was all set up I don't even have to think
about it - it just happens, except for the occasional archival and off-site
copies. I'm a professional software developer, so this is important for me
and worth the trouble. Even if I weren't, we now have large libraries of
digital photographs online, going back many years, and it would be terrible
to somehow lose all that history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of his
personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know it's
happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because of malware
or something like that, I've magically got all his files sitting right there
to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge another
bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've personally
had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but they were not
even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd have been thoroughly
hosed.

Tom

On 12/29/2014 11:33 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Doug Miller wrote:
John McCoy wrote in
:

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they
are smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO
there's an even more important one: security. I certainly wouldn't
store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

That's my biggest reason for not using cloud based storage. Between the
ongoing issues with credit card fraud (in a system that is inherently more
secure than your typical hosted storage provider), and what we are already
seeing now with cloud storage being hacked, I'm not good at all with
trusting my information to a provider out there somewhere. Security is a
joke and people are becoming too trusing of providers who "assure" the
integrity of their security.



FWIW all of your personal and confidential information is stored on some
type of cloud whether you initiated it or not. If you want your
personal information to remain private do not ever put it on any
computer connected to the internet or use a credit card, or use a bank,
or.....you get the idea. Just because you don't use the cloud to store
you data does not mean that some institution does not store your
personal data there.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:53:43 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 11:33 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Doug Miller wrote:
John McCoy wrote in
:

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they
are smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO
there's an even more important one: security. I certainly wouldn't
store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

That's my biggest reason for not using cloud based storage. Between the
ongoing issues with credit card fraud (in a system that is inherently more
secure than your typical hosted storage provider), and what we are already
seeing now with cloud storage being hacked, I'm not good at all with
trusting my information to a provider out there somewhere. Security is a
joke and people are becoming too trusing of providers who "assure" the
integrity of their security.



FWIW all of your personal and confidential information is stored on some
type of cloud whether you initiated it or not. If you want your
personal information to remain private do not ever put it on any
computer connected to the internet or use a credit card, or use a bank,
or.....you get the idea. Just because you don't use the cloud to store
you data does not mean that some institution does not store your
personal data there.

Just because someone stores your information somewhere in the "cloud"
doesn't mean you should compound the problem by volunteering to store
more on another server with unknown/suspect security. Maybe you want
to post your SSN & DOB here? ;-)

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:06:34 -0800, "Lew Hodgett"
wrote:

My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


The drives can shut down, but only if you've gone into the Power
configuration and told it to. Depending on what you use the
computerfor, the "no activity" timeouts can range from a couple of
minutes for the monitor and the hard drive(s) to whatever you need -
when I'm downloading new maps for the GPS, I set the drive timeout for
several hours because it's s-l-o-w.

I'm currently testing some solid state drives (SSD) for durability.
One is in a laptop that's on 24/7 (network monitor), so I'll get an
actual "in use" lifetime for it. Another will be the primary drive
foir a desktop that's also on most of the time. The biggest
improvement is in drive access - booting the laptop takes about half
as long as with the original drive.

On 12/28/2014 08:06 PM, Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered

SNIP

These two programs - one for Mac, one for PC - will save yer hide when used
with an external USB drive. They are free for home use (but you must buy
them if using them commercially):

For PC: Macrium Reflect Free Edition

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Don't forget to create a recovery boot disk when you first install this product.

For Mac: SuperDuper

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html

This will image your internal Mac drive to an external drive in one of
several ways. I prefer to clone the internal drive so that - if it borks -
I just plug in the external image and boot from that instead.


For Linux I do something more command-line-ish but it works rather well:

http://www.tundraware.com/TechnicalNotes/Baremetal/


Oh, and people who do not backup their stuff regularly should be charged
10x the normal shop rates for recovery ...


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



....and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.


--
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure,the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery"
-Winston Churchill

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:39:18 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

The second group is the universe of computer users. Some (most) have.
All, including those who already have, will.

On 12/29/2014 3:12 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:53:43 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 11:33 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Doug Miller wrote:
John McCoy wrote in
:

Bill wrote in news:m7qkvq02293
@news6.newsguy.com:

I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they
are smarter than me or not.

I do not trust the cloud for that purpose - too many pieces in
the line (servers, network, etc) which might fail at an inconvenient
time. To me the cloud is for collaboration - stuff I want other
people to have access to - not backup storage.

Although that's an important reason for distrusting the cloud, IMHO
there's an even more important one: security. I certainly wouldn't
store tax returns or banking records on the cloud.

That's my biggest reason for not using cloud based storage. Between the
ongoing issues with credit card fraud (in a system that is inherently more
secure than your typical hosted storage provider), and what we are already
seeing now with cloud storage being hacked, I'm not good at all with
trusting my information to a provider out there somewhere. Security is a
joke and people are becoming too trusing of providers who "assure" the
integrity of their security.



FWIW all of your personal and confidential information is stored on some
type of cloud whether you initiated it or not. If you want your
personal information to remain private do not ever put it on any
computer connected to the internet or use a credit card, or use a bank,
or.....you get the idea. Just because you don't use the cloud to store
you data does not mean that some institution does not store your
personal data there.

Just because someone stores your information somewhere in the "cloud"
doesn't mean you should compound the problem by volunteering to store
more on another server with unknown/suspect security.

Well actually me backing up to the cloud probably only adds maybe 2%
more of the same info that is already out there, probably not that much.
And as far as storing on an unknown/suspect security location, it is
already 98% in that situation by those that have the information already.



Maybe you want
to post your SSN & DOB here? ;-)


464-19-7262 09/27/1954
What can you do with that? FWIW it is scrambled just like it is when
I upload it. ;~)

On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

On 12/29/2014 06:12 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard
drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup
system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working
from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was
all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except
for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional
software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all
that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot
but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

I have several times unintentionally deleted a file. Fortunately, I
have always been able to recover it from a backup.

I use backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Runs automatically every night on a linux server running RAID1 on two
2TB drives.


--
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure,the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery"
-Winston Churchill

Leon wrote:

FWIW all of your personal and confidential information is stored on
some type of cloud whether you initiated it or not. If you want your
personal information to remain private do not ever put it on any
computer connected to the internet or use a credit card, or use a
bank, or.....you get the idea. Just because you don't use the cloud
to store you data does not mean that some institution does not store
your personal data there.

True - but you are missing the point. While what you state is true, there
is no reason to recklessly throw everything else in your private life out
there. Do you really not understand the notion of security Leon?

--

-Mike-

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:12:09 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)
I've recovered many a deleted file with nothing beyond the built-in
windows undelete function. When I say lose, I mean seriously loose,
through no action of your own.

wrote:


Just because someone stores your information somewhere in the "cloud"
doesn't mean you should compound the problem by volunteering to store
more on another server with unknown/suspect security. Maybe you want
to post your SSN & DOB here? ;-)

Huh? Sorry, but that just does not make any sense at all Maybe you want
to take another pass at that...

--

-Mike-

Leon wrote:

Well actually me backing up to the cloud probably only adds maybe 2%
more of the same info that is already out there, probably not that
much. And as far as storing on an unknown/suspect security location,
it is already 98% in that situation by those that have the
information already.

I guess that depends on what you back up to the cloud.

--

-Mike-

On 12/29/2014 7:21 PM, Doug Winterburn wrote:
On 12/29/2014 06:12 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard
drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup
system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping
up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working
from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different
building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was
all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except
for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional
software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even
if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all
that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity
USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily
backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an
external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself.
I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot
but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

I have several times unintentionally deleted a file. Fortunately, I
have always been able to recover it from a backup.

I use backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Runs automatically every night on a linux server running RAID1 on two
2TB drives.


I just go to the windows waste basket if I actually want it back.

On 12/28/2014 10:56 PM, Martin Eastburn wrote:
On 12/28/2014 8:06 PM, Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


Likely had recalled parts on the drive motherboard. Happens.
Industry is often driven into dangerous deals. Sale price of those
was so marginal due to other companies - fractions of a cent adds up.

I lost a powersupply to the computer with a cap that should not have
been used in a switcher. Quality of our computers is sliding down.
Sad to say. I would not doubt that some manufacturers plan on 5-6 year
life cycles to keep business going. Force us into 'cloud' crap and usb
disk drives at best.

Martin

Backup backup backup...

With XP I used ghost.
Now with win7 I use MS backup.

And that works, but make sure you get all patches for it.

--
Jeff

On 12/28/2014 11:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


2 minutes? Not in my book. It takes a from few minutes to a few hours to
get a delta. Never 2 minutes.



--
Jeff

On 12/29/2014 9:39 AM, Leon wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer
crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.


If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you
computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and steals
your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig.
This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data
selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.
No one is getting my data. No cloud period.

Now for that service you need a fast upload speed. I have 400k up.
That's just never going to do it.


--
Jeff

On 12/29/2014 9:05 PM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Leon wrote:

FWIW all of your personal and confidential information is stored on
some type of cloud whether you initiated it or not. If you want your
personal information to remain private do not ever put it on any
computer connected to the internet or use a credit card, or use a
bank, or.....you get the idea. Just because you don't use the cloud
to store you data does not mean that some institution does not store
your personal data there.

True - but you are missing the point. While what you state is true, there
is no reason to recklessly throw everything else in your private life out
there. Do you really not understand the notion of security Leon?



Perhaps you are being recklessly is saying something about my back up
procedure and know little to nothing about it.

Just because I use a method that works for me does not mean that I am
being reckless.

I take security very seriously but if you think your precautions will be
better than mine you might be more naive than you realize.

You might be taking yourself a bit too seriously if you believe that I
am being reckless with my data.

On 12/29/2014 9:05 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:12:09 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)
I've recovered many a deleted file with nothing beyond the built-in
windows undelete function.

Of course. ;~)

When I say lose, I mean seriously loose,
through no action of your own.

Seriousely, I don't loose files unless it is directly related to my own
carelessness. If I forget where I put the file, delete the file, or
loose it due to a crash, I consider that my fault.

On 12/29/2014 10:33 PM, woodchucker wrote:
On 12/29/2014 9:39 AM, Leon wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer
crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.


If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you
computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and steals
your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig.
This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data
selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.
No one is getting my data. No cloud period.

Now for that service you need a fast upload speed. I have 400k up.
That's just never going to do it.



FWIW IDrive will send you an externally HD for you to back up to and to
return to them. And visa versa should you need to restore every thing.
I chose to simply use the internet and 4 days of round the clock
backing up and I was done. Now anytime any file is created or changes
it is instantly backed up.

On 12/29/2014 09:30 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 7:21 PM, Doug Winterburn wrote:
On 12/29/2014 06:12 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard
drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup
system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping
up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working
from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different
building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was
all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except
for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional
software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even
if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all
that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity
USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily
backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine
because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an
external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself.
I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot
but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to
make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

I have several times unintentionally deleted a file. Fortunately, I
have always been able to recover it from a backup.

I use backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Runs automatically every night on a linux server running RAID1 on two
2TB drives.


I just go to the windows waste basket if I actually want it back.

Never empty the waste basket?


--
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure,the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery"
-Winston Churchill

Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 10:33 PM, woodchucker wrote:
On 12/29/2014 9:39 AM, Leon wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying
that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


I used to back up on an external, and then it began making my computer
crash and act weird when the drive began to fail.


If you back up to an external to save your data in the event you
computer crashes that works. In the event some one breaks in and
steals
your computer or you house burns down, the cloud works better.

I pay about $30 a year for 1TB, when I signed up it was for 300Gig.
This cloud works similar to normal back ups, you can delete old data
selectively from the cloud and cut back on what you have used.

FWIW I use iDrive.
No one is getting my data. No cloud period.

Now for that service you need a fast upload speed. I have 400k up.
That's just never going to do it.



FWIW IDrive will send you an externally HD for you to back up to and
to return to them. And visa versa should you need to restore every
thing.

You could also put a couple of DVDs in your safety deposit box, or
anywhere else that is not in the same building -- like in a secret
hiding place in your desk at work.
That was part of the "security manual" of the 70's. Don't store your
backup in the same building!



I chose to simply use the internet and 4 days of round the clock
backing up and I was done. Now anytime any file is created or changes
it is instantly backed up.

woodchucker wrote:
On 12/28/2014 11:18 PM, Bill wrote:
Lew Hodgett wrote:
My Hard Drive crapped out; however,dodged a bullet, and have
recovered.

My Geek is located kitty cornered across the parking lot which is
about a
solid 7 iron.

Was on puter Saturday afternoon (12/27/14) when suddenly "BANG", a
mechanical groan and the monitor goes dark.

Windows XP attempts to restart but with no avail.

Unplug all cables from the case, throw case on my shoulder and start
walking
toward the geek.

Geek plugs cables into case and begins running chkdsk.

It's now about 6:00 PM and it is obvious these diagnostics are going
to take awhile, so geek says he will call me.

I'm in choke city since almost everything including the phones (Magic
Jack)
is handled on the puter.

I get a call from geek about 12:00 PM on Sunday (12/28/14) saying that
the hard drive needs to be replaced, the existing data needs to be
recovered then loaded into new drive.

He quotes a price and if I accept, he can be finished by 3:00 PM.

Such a deal, let me know when you are done and the case is ready
for pick up.

I had a bucket full of rabbit's feet this weekend and used them all
today
starting with the fact that the geek gave up his Saturday evening and
all
day Sunday to repair my puter.

Normally they close at 5:00 PM on Saturday and are closed all day
Sunday.

Now for the luck.

The geek was able to recover ALL my data including programs.

I had the same thing happen in 1994 when I left the puter on 24/7
since I was using puter as a FAX.

Was told that the failure in 1994 was due to running hard drive on a
continuous duty cycle and that technology had changed and when the
new puter would be in idle mode the hard drive would also be at idle.

Turns out that is not true.

When the puter is in idle mode, the hard drive is still spinning, so
plan
accordingly.

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Not all that time was spent with puter on; however, 15-18 hours/day
would be more typical.

As this day closes, am back up and running and consider myself to
be very lucky.

Lew


It takes less than 2 minutes to backup everything to an external hard
drive ($70, these days?) once a week. Then you don't have to be lucky.
I know some people are using the cloud. I'm not sure whether they are
smarter than me or not. I know an Apple user who pays about $70/yr
for backup (and perhaps other services). I figure I'm ahead of him, at
least.


2 minutes? Not in my book. It takes a from few minutes to a few hours
to get a delta.

I've got two 80 GB SDD backing up to eSata external drive. It almost
always only does incremental changes. YMMV.

I bought an Intel (730) 500 GB SSD for $199 over the holidays, which
didn't seem so bad since the 1st 80 GB SSD was $229, which
was "cheap" for it at the time and I think the 2nd one i added was
$120. My wife will take them over. My PC from 1997 had a 6.4 GB
HDD, but I never used much more than about a half of it!

BTW, there is only one new motherboard I found that supports eSata still
(and it was "silly" high-end). So, I either will need to use the
external in USB 2.0 mode (never tried it), or upgrade the external drive
to USB 3.0--which I expert will give about the same level of performance
at the eSata.



Never 2 minutes.

Doug Winterburn wrote:
On 12/29/2014 09:30 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 7:21 PM, Doug Winterburn wrote:
On 12/29/2014 06:12 PM, Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many
years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a
three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five
for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard
drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run
until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy
when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup
system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical
drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and
daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping
up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of
those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up
to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office
backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working
from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different
building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it
was
all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens,
except
for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional
software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even
if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all
that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity
USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily
backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even
know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine
because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an
external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't
put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to)
dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself.
I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not
boot
but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining
backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to
make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)

I have several times unintentionally deleted a file. Fortunately, I
have always been able to recover it from a backup.

I use backuppc: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Runs automatically every night on a linux server running RAID1 on two
2TB drives.


I just go to the windows waste basket if I actually want it back.

Never empty the waste basket?

I run CCleaner almost once a day (love it)--download it from Sourceforge
(to avoid bloatware, etc.)

Leon wrote:
On 12/29/2014 9:05 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:12:09 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many
years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a
three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the
hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy
when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup
system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical
drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping
up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office
backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm
working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different
building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it
was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens,
except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional
software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble.
Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose
all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a
large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily
backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine
because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an
external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to
yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not
boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups
I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to
make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)
I've recovered many a deleted file with nothing beyond the built-in
windows undelete function.

Of course. ;~)

When I say lose, I mean seriously loose,
through no action of your own.

Seriousely, I don't loose files unless it is directly related to my
own carelessness. If I forget where I put the file, delete the file,
or loose it due to a crash, I consider that my fault.

I have seen applications (MS Visual Studio comes to mind) eat files
before, as in "its gone".

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 22:38:45 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 9:05 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:12:09 -0600, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 6:39 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:19:14 -0700, Doug Winterburn
wrote:

On 12/29/2014 10:39 AM, tdacon wrote:


"Lew Hodgett" wrote in message
eb.com...

SFWIW, the drive that just died was placed in service in 05/08 and
died 12/14, or 6-1/2 years .

Lew, the solid-state stuff in a computer will usually last many years
without trouble, but the electro-mechanical parts have shorter life
cycles. There's a reason that hard drive manufacturers offer only
one-year to three-year warranties except for the most expensive
enterprise-level drives. I generally keep my computers on a three- to
five-year replacement cycle (three for my work computers, five for a
household computer). If a household computer is running quite
trouble-free but getting old, I'll generally just replace the hard drive
after five years as a matter of course. Power supplies I run until I
either (1) start having trouble with them or (2) need more power on
account of a power-hungry replacement video card. Fans get noisy when
they get old but they're cheap and easy to replace.

And I maintain a rigorous automated backup schedule. My backup system is
a two-drive RAID 1 system on my network (RAID 1: two physical drives,
with the same contents on each in case one of them fails), and daily
backups of all document directories are done every night, keeping up to
two weeks of daily backups. Periodically I archive one each of those
daily backups onto a large external hard drive and keep them up to a
year. When I had an office downtown I kept off-site office backups at
home, and off-site home backups at the office. Now that I'm working from
my home office I just keep the off-site backups in a different building
on the property. This all sounds like a lot of work, but once it was all
set up I don't even have to think about it - it just happens, except for
the occasional archival and off-site copies. I'm a professional software
developer, so this is important for me and worth the trouble. Even if I
weren't, we now have large libraries of digital photographs online,
going back many years, and it would be terrible to somehow lose all that
history.

For a friend whose computer I maintain, I just put a large-capacity USB
drive in a slot on the back of the machine and set up a daily backup of
his personal file directories to the USB drive. He doesn't even know
it's happening, but if I need to wipe and re-setup his machine because
of malware or something like that, I've magically got all his files
sitting right there to be restored.

You could do the same. Use Windows Backup and either attach an external
USB-connected hard drive or plug in a big USB memory card. Don't put
yourself in a position where you might have to (might fail to) dodge
another bullet like that someday at much greater cost to yourself. I've
personally had hard drives fail so that not only would they not boot but
they were not even readable. If I hadn't been maintaining backups I'd
have been thoroughly hosed.

Tom



...and most important, run through a restore cycle now and then to make
sure backed up something useful.
There are only 2 kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data,
and those who will.

I would hope so, who has not deleted a file? ;~)
I've recovered many a deleted file with nothing beyond the built-in
windows undelete function.

Of course. ;~)

When I say lose, I mean seriously loose,
through no action of your own.

Seriousely, I don't loose files unless it is directly related to my own
carelessness. If I forget where I put the file, delete the file, or
loose it due to a crash, I consider that my fault.
And what do you call it when your hard drive crashes -- or loses a
few sectors. Not as common as it used to be, but it still happens. Or
when the hard drive totally gives up the ghost.

That is "seriously losing" a file "through no action of your own"
Sometimes the data recovery boys can get it back for a (fairly hefty)
price. Sometimes they are gone forever.

I recommend "belt and suspenders" for anything important.
RAID 5 or better drive array, backed up to Network Attached Storage,
backed up to removeable hard drive kept off site.
For NAS we've been using Q-Nap raid boxes. At the one office the
entire server is also mirrored to a second identical server in the
opposite end of the building.
The other office has the second server in the same server rack. Both
servers have redundant power supplies, powered from 2 separate dual
conversion UPS units, on separate circuits, each on different phases
so even if one transformer dies we still have power to both servers.
The one office has been using WD Live drives for removeable drives,
the other office has been using USB SSDs.

Bill wrote:

That was part of the "security manual" of the 70's. Don't store your
backup in the same building!


I mentioned that to a college IT manager once, and she just looked at me
incredulously (as if, where
do you expect me to put them?)