AHunter, while I agree with you, lets try to not have this thread devolve into a Mac Vs. PC flamewar, safe computing practices are safe computing practices no matter what platform they’re on, and incompetent computing practices are also similarly platform-agnostic
I do like the “dedicated apps hard drive” idea, and I do generally do that myself, but invariably, all my hard drives (both internal and external) somehow end up growing known-good System Folders, “just in case”, always good to have multiple redundancies
…heck, my old 40GB 4G iPod “Clickwheel” model has a known-good copy of 10.4.9 on it as well, after all, you never know when it’ll come in handy…
Mr. Winkelried is smart. My current company actually runs disaster recovery exercises - as in flying people to an IT recovery facility out-of-state to restore.
“Welcome to Philadelphia. Your company has rented these AS/400s, that mainframe, this row of rack-mounted servers and this bunch of networking gear. The shipping container in loading dock 4 is full of backup tapes form your off-site storage. Your badges expire in 72 hours. Your mission is to bring the critical apps back to life and provide access.”
Put the fear of Og in me, it did. First attempt failed pretty badly, too.
(We’ve now moved to focus on business continuity rather than backup-and-restore in case of disaster. If the LA data center is flooded with untreated sewage (don’t ask), the critical apps are already mirrored off-state in real time. Works better, and without heroic efforts.)
For the home user or small business user, who doesn’t know Windows that well, I recommend:
Do a backup, compare the number of files and the size of the backup with the folders being backed up, and see if they are the same. If so, try restoring one file at random. If that works, then you’re in good shape and you may just as well assume that the backup worked right. If you run into trouble you can’t handle, a PC tech should be able to help you recover.
But always keep your application CDs in a place where you know you can find them! Once you upgrade an application, take the old application CD and write on it OBSOLETE or SUPERSEDED BY VERSION XXX so you don’t get confused.
For a large company, of course, you want to go through the kind of exercise that Spiny Norman describes.
Yeah, well, as a small business manager (I’m not the owner) I’m just as tired of techno-geeks like MacTech who expect everyone who owns a computer to know everyting about how to fix the damn thing. I don’t know how to fix my car when it goes on the fritz, either, but my mechanic doesn’t bitch when I bring it in and tell him, “It doesn’t work.” He doesn’t make me spend an hour trouble-shooting the car and he doesn’t think I’m an idiot because I can’t break down the engine and rebuild it by myself. He’s just happy to take my money (which I’m happy to part with because he keeps my car running.)
Some day I’d like to find a computer repair/service/maintenance person as professional and kindly helpful as my auto mechanic.
Heh. Early in my stint as the effective DBA of an ancient Informix database at my current employer (not a small business, a Fortune 500 company, but this particular DB server was the responsibility of this one site), I got to explain this to an IT manager. They had a very sensible backup process in place (probably overkill for this particular server), nightly tape backups stored in a fireproof safe, the tapes moved offsite each weekend and recycled after three months.
The backups, I found, had not successfully been written to the tapes in over four months. Nobody knew how to read the logs. :smack: Fortunately, I caught it about a week before we had a major failure.
Trust me: if you bring in your four-year-old Chevy and tell him it doesn’t work, and he looks at the engine and says, “When did you last change the oil?”, and you say, “You’re supposed to change the oil?”; he may not bitch to your face, but in the mechanic break room he’s talking up a storm.
Anyone who buys a complicated piece of machinery has a responsibility to be aware of the routine maintenance tasks needed to keep it working properly. Maybe you don’t know how to change your own oil, but you at least know to take your car to Jiffy Lube regularly. And if you do neither, and burn out the engine, you know whose fault it is, and don’t bitch at the mechanic because he can’t rebuild your engine in two hours for fifty dollars, nor at General Motors because they don’t build an engine that can survive that kind of neglect.
Sunrazor surely you can understand the value of protecting your valuable data against the inevitable hardware failure, correct?
I’m not expecting SBO’s to know how to repair their machines or build one from scratch (but I DO appreciate the rare ones that do know how, they’re great to deal with), but I DO hope that the SBO at least knows how to back up their machines in the first place
as long as you have your data archived safely on your backup media/device of choice, and perform regular backups, it’ll make both your job and my job easier
think about it, you have a current backup on an external drive (lets say that afternoon) later that afternoon, your machine’s internal hard drive craps out, dies, expires, starts pining for the Fijords, the Magic Smoke™ escapes, this is your only machine and you’re now down for the count and out of business…
you bring your machine and backup drive into my store, I confirm drive failure, and give you prices on replacement drives, you choose a drive, which I install, format and get ready to go, I then hook up your backup drive to the machine, and restore from your backup drive, you’re back up and running with no data loss, you’re back in business…
wouldn’t that be valuable to you?
to use the car analogy again, I’m not expecting SBO’s to know how to change their oil or air filter, or rotate their tires, replace the exhaust system, or perform a valve adjustment or piston ring replacement, but I DO expect them to understand that these things are important, and need to be planned for, and not to blame US when your engine runs dry of oil and seizes hard…
Some physical hard drive “failures” are due to excessive heat, and cooling it down below room temp will give it a few minutes more runtime before it faults again.
Some physical hard drive “failures” are due to the heads or cylinders getting stuck, and thermal shock (rapid heating and cooling) can make them unstuck.
I have been told that both of these situations can rarely be fixed by putting the drive in the freezer, but it is almost always tried as a means of last resort to recover data.
I put failures in quotes because many times the drive is reporting errors in relatively few sectors and the rest are fine. Of course in less you know what data lies in those sectors it might as well all be bad.
Sunrazor is making a good point though (though SCSimmons and MacTech have had good responses) - when you buy a computer, there is typically no way provided for easy backups. Computer people always talk about backups, but until it’s made easy and cheap people won’t be doing it. Computers should come with an additional external hard drive to do a backup. (I’m sorry, but using CDs or DVDs for backup doesn’t cut it in the digital age, when manufacturers advertise their home computers as the devices to use for storing your photos, movies and music.) They should come with a backup program. The EZ setup instructions for your computer should be:
Here is how you hook up the keyboard and mouse
2 Here is how you turn it on
Here is how you do your first backup - press this button.
The newest Macintosh OS is one of the first consumer operating systems that has an intuitive backup system delivered along with the OS. (I haven’t installed it yet but from what I’ve seen it looks very easy.)
Sorry to bump a slightly older thread, but after reading this and realizing that if my laptop crashes and I lose data, I don’t get paid (self employed atm), I bought a Western Digital My Book.
My files are getting backed up even as I type this post.
Thanks for the heads up; I think backing up data tends to fall in the same category of eating your veggies, brushing your teeth, etc. You know you need to do it but until it’s a habit, it doesn’t get done.
