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Author Topic: Frustration with software  (Read 6724 times)
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Phoenix
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« on: 2009-10-26, 02:46 »

I just spent an entire day attempting to back up my hard drive onto DVD.  It gets to the last 5%, and then two things happen.  First, the power fails.  Not a problem as I have battery.  Then, finally on the last disk, approximately 12 minutes until completion... and it creates a write error.  Not only does it throw a write error, but it also terminates the operation.  In addition, I check the archive integrity... and even the first disk it says is not a valid archive, despite it not complaining prior.  100% completion, and 100% complete failure.  So... I rant.  I am not a happy bird right now.  Sipgate - Evil
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ReBoOt
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« Reply #1 on: 2009-10-26, 08:20 »

Well i had a quite fun problem aswell..after some updates from microsoft, my laptop decided to shut it down when playing 3d games..so i thought it was an overheating problem..but it wasnt...then i flashed the bios and suddenly everything works!? o_O seems like windows for some reason got the impression of the games actually wanted to turn off the computer..very odd..oh well Slipgate - Smile
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scalliano
 

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« Reply #2 on: 2009-10-27, 00:11 »

@Pho: PLEASE tell me you didn't lose everything Slipgate - WTF
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Tabun
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« Reply #3 on: 2009-10-27, 00:16 »

I don't backup to DVD anymore -- too much hassle, too many errors. Annoyance like that really made me give up on that medium for regular backups. I now use two external harddisks. One I even keep at my parents', so if the place burns down, I still have something left..
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Phoenix
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« Reply #4 on: 2009-10-27, 02:18 »

Scal:  No, I didn't lose any data, the backup process just cost me a lot of time I could have allocated to other tasks.

What annoys me the most is that I had used Ghost in the past without difficulty, and now it won't read any media even though the media is fine.  Apparently this is due to a glitch in the Gear driver software used by the program, and it's not an uncommon problem.  Uninstalling and reinstalling and updating the Gear driver did not help.  Prior to this I used to manually allocate and create data DVD's, which works... except that when you have 100+ GB of data it takes a long time and is very tedious, which was the whole point of wanting to automate the process.  I tried using Acronis True Image, and it appeared to be working... until it got to the last disk and then failed at 100%, and did not even recognize its own backup data on disk 1, which means it did not function properly at all during the backup procedure.  Apparently this is also a problem others have encountered.  I've never had problems with the writer drive, and it's working fine with everything else, so I am not certain what went wrong, only that it did go wrong.  It's possible that my alternate copy of Windows is having a problem (I always backup with the primary drive offline), but there is no logical reason as backups from this install have worked flawlessly in the past.

Tab:  That's what I'm going to do from this point is backup to an offline hard disk.  I'm going to create a RAID array and then replicate my existing drive onto the array, which was my original plan, but I wanted to get a DVD backup done prior.  I have the drives for the array, two 500GB drives that I intend to run in RAID 1 (mirroring).  I'll acquire an additional drive and an enclosure and use it as a spare for backups at some point in the future as my existing 160 won't be adequate for that forever.
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ReBoOt
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« Reply #5 on: 2009-10-27, 08:10 »

Raid is nice but it's not an backup very fun when 1 disk comes corrupt and replicate the corrupt data to the 2nd hdd Slipgate - Tongue

external hdd's is the way to go!
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Phoenix
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« Reply #6 on: 2009-10-28, 01:58 »

I have my RAID array set up now.  That gives me 364 GB of free space since I'm on a mirrored set of 500 GB drives.  My old 160 GB drive still has the data on it, so I effectively have a hard drive backup.  I'll see about acquiring another 500 GB drive so I can do external backups in the future once my capacity exceeds that of the 160.

Boot, I hear you, but if you start with a fragged drive it's going to be fragged no matter what.  The primary reason I wanted a RAID 1 set up is so that if a mechanical failure occurs in a drive I don't get knocked back to my previous backup.  That doesn't prevent things such as a virus infection, mainboard failure, or internal power surge from wiping both drives out, but it's an extra layer of protection, and for a lousy $50 extra for a second drive, to me it was worth it.  I'm usually good about not having hard disks mechanically fail as I'm very gentle with them, and I have two 50 CFM fans blowing air over them constantly to keep them cool, but I've been through drive failures before and I don't like leaving things to chance.  I do back Gen's code up to a second computer regularly, so even if my first machine dies completely I don't lose the source code even if I did have to restore to an earlier backup.  I might lose other stuff though, like important emails, that I'd rather not lose.

The good news is that I'm up and running, and setting up the raid array was simple.  I will offer some advice though.  Silicon Image's RAID controller is a bit more friendly than NVRAID.  I could not get the NVRAID driver to install in Windows.  The Silicon Image driver went in peacefully.  Though the backup process failed using Acronis, the drive cloning feature is very nice and worked flawlessly.  It took me longer to rearrange the hardware than it did to clone 135 GB worth of data.
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