I am *SO* sick of clueless small-business owners.......

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

MacTech, if you ever decide to drum up some business doing a “take care of your computers” seminar, wander over to the kitchen store at the Crossings at Foxrun in Newington. A few months ago their computer system “went down” while I was shopping and no one could figure out how to reboot it. They couldn’t accept debit, credit, OR checks whilst this went on. Just cash and purchasing orders. I couldn’t believe that not one of the employees, including the manager, could figure out how to reboot their server.

There’s some ad claiming that over a third of businesses in this state are home-based, so you could make a fortune teaching owners how to back crap up. Could be a business of your own, even :smiley:

Cyberhwk, if you need to back all that up, you might want to buy an external hard drive. For $100 I bought a 250GB external drive in January; I assume a smaller one would be even cheaper. They don’t even need any software installed, so you could back up data to one of those, and plug it into whatever computer you want.

22

Can anyone help me … how does putting it in the freezer help data recovery?

23

I’m assuming the data wasn’t corrupted but that the hard drive had failed in some other way. I’m still sketchy on how putting it in the freezer helps, but it sounds cool, which is enough for me.

24

I’ve got much the same amount of data in total, but how much is worth backing up?

Last time I backed up my drive, I just took what was in My Documents and decided that if necessary, I would install all my applications again from scratch. As a simple home user, that’s probably enough, in fact a clean wipe of the HD would be an idea to my dithering over what can go and what can’t.

25

The issue here, IMNSHO, is are you 100% sure that there are no other files you can’t live without? That you may only access once a year, or less, but have data that you consider vital. And, of course, not all programs put user data into folders within “My Documents,” just to make things more fun. (All the programs you use may well do that - I’m just saying in general, not everyone can simply back up "My Documents and be sure to have all their word processor files backed up.)

The way I looked at it was “Do I want to be sure I have everything I want backed up, or am I sure I’ll be able to remember everything?” Considering the state of my memory… I chose what appears to me to be the “fail-safe” condition: back-up everything.

26

Heh, heh, heh. Back when I worked for a certain cellphone company (Litoris can back me up on how things were there), it was astounding how bad everything was.

I was a Customer Servile Rep (or “Customer Care Specialist” as they called it :rolleyes: ), and the PCs were seriously underpowered (and running Windows 2K, which would occassionally fill up the miniscule HDDs with a temp file [their solution to this was to reformat and reinstall]). The security system they had set up was, uh, not so good. To do your job, you had to have about 4 programs running (at least until they switched to a crash happy program that I refused to use), each one password protected. When you neared the end of your training, they sent you an email with a link to an intranet page, on this page you keyed in your SSN and it spit out your passwords to the programs you needed to do your job. If you poked around in Outlook Express, you could find the names of everyone employed by the company, given that most of the employees used the companies products, they all had accounts listed in the database. (Decoding their email address would tell you what facility they worked at.) You could then pull up their account, get their SSN, go to the intranet link, key in their SSN and get their passwords for the various programs. At this point, Bob’s your uncle. You can now run amok in the system doing whatever you wanted, and it’d all get blamed on them.

I, of course, only used my powers for good (and now I feel stupid for not “treating” myself to some goodies :smack: ), and used the passwords of former employees (so they couldn’t blame some poor schmuck) to fix problems which arose that there was no solution for, or management was being an ass about. (Oh, look, this poor guy’s been on hold for an hour, trying to get his phone working that we fubared, but I can’t get any supervisors to come over and call the help desk so we can fix the problem. Hmmm, he’s been nice, polite and patient, I think I’ll just send him a brand new phone that just happens to be the most expensive one we make and I’ll see to it that he get’s the phone for free, thanks to a former coworker!)

One day a got a phone call from an exec in the landline division of the company, who needed to make some changes to his account. This just happened to be on a day when we were having a number of problems with the system. He was not happy at how long it was taking to get things changed, and I explained to him that I quite agreed and wished that there was something I could do to speed the process up, but there were a number of problems with the system and a bunch of hoops to jump through for what should have been a simple task, and explained everything to him in great detail and expressed my wish that there was some way this could be improved. Their solution? Outsource the CSR department. :smack:

27

No kidding. A few years ago a situation developed where the file and email servers were so full of crap the daily backups were taking 28 hours to complete. :smack: This went on for about 9 months until they finally got a new tape robot.

28

I don’t even want you to explain how this is possible. It just makes me sad.

29

I had a client bring me his Mother’s computer, which wouldn’t boot anymore. She had never made a backup of anything in nearly 10 years. I determined that the drive wasn’t spinning up. and figured that the bearings were almost dry. I left the drive in the blazing Arizona sun until it was too hot to touch, and then tried to boot the machine. It worked. and I was able to recover everything.

As an aside, I will often times back up client’s machines onto one of my mondo hard drives. I figure if they ever have a catastrophic failure, at least i will be able to recover something.

30

What operating system are you using? Windows ? Linux ? Macintosh OS? Other?

Step 1: buy an external hard disk that’s big enough to include everything you need to backup (see step 3 - are you using method a) or b))

Step 2: buy some backup software.

Step 3: decide which type of backup you want to do:
a) a complete backup of everything
b) or a backup of only the documents you’ve created yourself, without the applications?

Step 4: backup your system regularly. If you want to be extra-careful, store the external hard drive in a different location after each backup (different room than your main computer, or even in a different house altogether.)

Comparison of methods:
Method a)

  • When you need to restore, you won’t need to find the disks to reinstall your OS, and all applications (plus reinstall any updates / patches to the OS and all applications).
  • Backup disk must be bigger than the set of disks you plan on backing up.
  • Backup will take longer

Method b)

  • When you need to restore, you will need to find the disks to reinstall your OS, and all applications (plus reinstall any updates / patches to the OS and all applications).
  • Backup disk can be much smaller
  • Backup will tbe faster

I personally prefer Method a) but it’s not possible for everybody.

The crucial thing to remember about backups is this.

When people start telling me about how they backup (or fail to backup) their system, I usually wave them away. I’m not interested in their backups. Backups are irrelevant and none of my concern. Here is what I want to know: how do you restore your system after failure? Have you ever tried it? Have you ever practiced? How much data will you have lost after the restore? A day’s worth? 5 minute’s worth? How much data loss are you willing to live with? How long are you willing to wait, twiddling your thumbs, while the system is being restored?

No one really wants to do a backup. They want to do a restore after failure.

31

Or sign up with Mozy. It automatically backs up your data daily. Works in the background so you don’t even realize it’s happening. You restore files by opening your Mozy account like a hard drive and dragging and dropping.

For most home users, the free version is fine – 2 Gigs of data backup. That’s plenty for files as long as you’re not backing up music files. And, of course, don’t bother backing up programs; you can reinstall them from disk or download.

But if you need more, there’s Mozy Pro. It’s $3.95 a month plus 50 cents per Gig per month. 128 Gig storage costs $67.95/month. To keep costs down, you can determine which files you want to back up instead of backing up them all. You’re better off putting 5-year-old files on a CD-ROM.

32

:confused: Four months of paying that free would get you a 500GB external hard drive and a backup program for home use, wouldn’t it?

33

Also, this is true, as long as you know where are your application disks are, or remember when you downloaded them from. How many times have I heard a home user tell me “I have no idea where those disks are” and then pulling out software disks for a version that’s 3 years older than the one they have on their PC.

34

Another advantage of Method A (Back up everything) is that if you use the right backup program (on a Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) at least on a Mac, the full backup (or “clone”) is bootable, after you back up using those apps, you can then reboot off your backup and VERIFY that the backup works, and that all your files are indeed there

many people miss that crucial step, VERIFYING their backup, don’t just blindly trust that your backups are okay, make sure they are

I don’t know if windows machines can do this as well, but on a Mac, booting off a bootable backup clone is easy, reboot, hold down the “Option” key to get to the Boot Manager, then select the pushbutton that represents the cloned hard drive and click the “proceed” arrow

35

You are also paying for having the backup off-site. (If your house burns down your external hard drive is gone too.)

36

Most people don’t do that because it’s really hard to do. You can verify the data was saved to the backup OK, but to verify it actually works after a restore means you have to actually restore it and risk mucking up your existing system.

37

That’s true, but for a home user I would recommend keeping another external hard drive at your mother’s house (or son’s house.).

38

At least try to restore one file from the backup - take one of your important files at random, rename it to something else, and then try to get back that same file from your backup.

39

Small business owners are not large business owners for a reason.

If you do not or choose not to understand technology or standard business practices and processes, your business will only grow as large as you can manage it using the back of napkins and handshake deals.

You go to Circuit City or NewEgg.com or wherever and buy a 150+ GB hard drive.

There are various programs for backing up data, but I usually just CTRL-C, CTRL-V the entire My Documents folder to the new location and wait. I’ll still have to reinstall the OS and any applications, but at least I don’t need to be concerned with corrupt images, out of date versions of backup software or anything else that will leave me like “why the fuck isn’t this working”?

Also, programs like BeyondCompare let you compare two directories and just copy files where there are gaps or differences.

40

A simple not-completely-accurate explanation.

Sometimes the drive fails because the spinning platters get stuck, or something gets stuck on them. When you put the drive in the freezer, the platters contract infinitesimally, which can sometimes be enough to knock the disk free, or the bit of crap loose. It can get you enough boot time until the drive re-heats so that you can extract the data you are trying to recover.