Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, July 18, 2005:
Murphy Strikes Back
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.As Raza just pointed out in a comment, I've been silent the past few days. Unfortunately this was due to a hard drive failure on my G5 Friday morning. I've been recovering since then. I had backups and the few things I didn't have backed up I was able to restore. Plus while all this was going on I figured it's a good time to redo alot of stuff. So I purchased 2 200gb drives and set them up in RAID 1 (mirrored) so that this never happens again, I purchased and installed tiger (which makes doing RAID very easy), I installed all the latest version of all the software I use and so on. I don't really have the heart to go into all the details, it's been to traumatic but I do want to point to a few excellent pieces of software which saved my butt.
1. SuperDuper - which makes it super easy to create full backups of your system. Not just backups but 100% complete and working copies. This really saved me because I had this backing up to a firewire drive. So when the main drive died I was able to still boot the computer by holding down "t" during startup which made the mac boot from the firewire drive. Worked perfect. That let me install:
2. Data Rescue X - which did an amazing job of going through the dead drive and finding everything that was recoverable. I only had a week or so missing from the backup, but there were some important things there that I needed. It was amazing, because the drive wouldn't mount, but Rescue X was able to get on there and pull back that data that wasn't destroyed.
I'm just getting things rolling again now. This set me back a few days, but hopefully I've got everything covered now. I've moved into full paranoia mode with the RAID, plus firewire backup, plus I wrote scripts to move critical data to the server. I should have been more thorough before, but that's how it goes.
Discussion
Ian,
It's good to head that you recovered all of your critical data. This is also a wakeup call for probably a lot of people reading your blog because people hardly develop a habit of doing backups until they end up in such a situation.
I am one of them too and now it has become my priority to take a backup as soon as possible, hopefully before disaster strikes in.
Being on windows , i have to figure out whats the best option. Maybe put a big drive in an old machine and put in a corner running linux and rsync. Setup a script on my windows machine to run rsync at night backing up critical files for me.
Have to check if rsync is available for windows.
Created by Raza on 07.18.2005 1:07 pm
Yep. I lost a little data, but nothing too major. The backups saved me. Now I'm super backed up so nothing critical should ever be lost. Not sure about rsync for win, never heard of anyone doing it but it might be out there.
Created by Ian on 07.18.2005 1:07 pm
I also have to note that installing the 2 drives was so ridiculously easy that I don't know the proper words to describe it. I still love the Mac baby!
Created by Ian on 07.18.2005 1:07 pm
Ouch!
Good to know that you had backups in place! Just last week, I burned 4 DVD's to back up my data!
JD
P.S.: I didn't notice the gap. Interesting.
Created by JD on 07.18.2005 1:07 pm
Reinstalling things + losing some data must have sucked. Good thing it's behind you now.
I too revamped my backup policy a couple days ago and I was feeling I wasted my time (because -due to pure luck- I have never experienced data loss in ~15 years). To tell the truth, after reading this post, I feel the time spent was well justified.
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Created by Dimitris Giannitsaros on 07.18.2005 1:07 pm