So I went and bought a WD terabyte external HD, something I should have done years ago anyway with all the important stuff I have on this computer, and am now backing up all my porn my important work files. Once that is done, I now have a clean copy of Windows 7, not an upgrade, and I will start over.
The joy of this is hard to describe.
And Tunch ate his day’s allotment of food by 4:30 pm and has been standing behind me shrieking since then.
Phoenix Woman
((((hug))))
Good luck, John! Fingers crossed here for you.
eric
just got the TB hard drive myslef; made a mirror image of the hard drive and have tons of space for all of my video files. it was liberating.
General Winfield Stuck
The joy of this is hard to describe.
annie
Is Tunch shrieking for food or for the porn — oops I meant work files. Exactly where did the little boy go on his exciting adventure????????
eric
@General Winfield Stuck: i can still remember the day i learned about “restore points.” nirvana
SiubhanDuinne
Need. Picture. Of. Tunch. Shrieking.
annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
I agree………..
cleek
my 1TB RAID 5 server, happily purring away in the corner while patiently awaiting its next semi-weekly backup, wishes you luck.
soonergrunt
I had a vista upgrade to win7 go perfectly, and two clean installs of win7 onto xp machines go perfectly. All data restored to the machines, back on the home network, the whole nine yards.
I love being me.
Bad Horse's Filly
Translation: Dad, I am mighty hunter, I needs nurshmnt.
geg6
I’d feed him if I were you, John. If not, he might pull that same little disappearing trick on you that he did the other night. You know, that patently obvious ruse he used to get you to set “traps” with food. All I’m gonna say is I don’t know if you really understand who was setting a trap for who.
Cat Lady
Joseph Campbell said that computers are like the Old Testament god – always asking for more and more sacrifice, rending of garments and slaying of enemies, with no payoff until all is forsaken, and maybe even not then. Like Tunch. I think he was on to something.
General Winfield Stuck
I have an XP re-install disk from my last Gateway Computer that died. Although I’ve been told I can use it to install XP on my new Dell Vista machine, I ain’t gonna try it. Though in a moment of over confidence and brain fart I likely will some day, but not today. Nosiree.
SiubhanDuinne
Bitsy is at 4800.
ellaesther
…and you wonder why he escaped your cruel, neglectful, starvation-inducing clutches the other day.
Tsk.
jeffreyw
After alla this stuff today, I downloaded the latest Acronis True Image and first thing after it installed I had it make a full partition image backup on a portable HD I keep in the drawer right next to me. Then I made a boot disc. Breathing a bit easier now.
Comrade Darkness
As a fellow owner of a fat cat, I ask you: who cares if the cat is fat? It means nothing other than that you are able to peacefully go on with your life. And how important is that, relative to the centerfoldicity of a pet?
baldheadeddork
Don’t forget to back up your email and browser files.
E-mail me for assistance if you need it.
robertdsc
Funny, I always thought of John & Tunch as equals. Lily and her daddy, yes. Tunch and his daddy, no. Odd.
This Mac user wishes you well, John. I have 800 GB of -porn- work files attached to my eMac via FireWire.
eric
@jeffreyw: i felt immortal after the boot disk was done ;)
Dream On
I’m really enjoying my Mac today. Simple and fast.
Somebody had to say it.
JGabriel
John Cole:
Not something I would normally recommend, but: feed him again.
The last thing you need while rebuilding your PC, and it attendant irritations, is the added irritation of a whinging cat.
I know, I’ve been there. Just consider it a special circumstance and feed him till he shuts up.
.
chuck
While we’re slashdot today, anyone got a recommendation for a 1TB ESATA drive that doesn’t take eons to detect?
I have a WD MyBook 2TB (set to RAID1 so it’s 1TB now) that always requires two boots, because it’s too busy initializing to even be detected by the ESATA controller the first boot. I want a nice external drive for my DirecTV DVR (so it has to be ESATA, not USB or FW) but I’m not going to tolerate these slow warmup shenanigans.
Um okay. Anyone got a good cookie recipe? I’m tired of making chocolate chip and PB.
wvng
While I agree that having a disk image backup is a deeply reassuring thing, have any of you ever had to restore a drive from such a backup? I have always wondered if it would actually work.
baldheadeddork
Maybe Tunch heard about this.
(It’s a damn shame you can’t post pictures in comments…
chuck
Image backups of the sort made by Acronis, Ghost, or the builtin version in Windows 7 are a little smarter than a bitwise partition copy — you can restore them to any size partition as long as it’s big enough. Works like a charm.
Personally I love my Backup Exec at work, but BE is expensive, and sadly there’s nothing in the Norton line that’s anywhere as nice.
Michael D.
Wow! You spent money on Windows 7 AND Tunch’s allotment of food on the same day?
You probably need a bailout!
Comrade Mary
John, I just bought a 1 TB drive a few weeks ago and it has changed my life. No more haphazard backup to a collection of CDs and DVDs.
Just one thing: once Tunch stops shrieking and you have a functional computer again, and you’ve had a drink or two, and you’ve gotten some sleep, go out and get another backup drive.
Drives fail. It’s what they do. Back up to TWO drives on a regular basis, and you will be much better protected.
(I’m uploading some crucial files now for a colleague whose storage system crashed just today. She may or may not be able to get other files off her trashed drive, but at least I can share what we had stored in common).
Roger Moore
If you’re really serious, buy yourself a second external hard drive. Keep one in your desk at work and one hooked up to your computer at home. Run mirroring software so the one at home gets copies of all your important files. Once a week, swap the home drive with the work drive. That way you have a recent copy right there if your hard drive ever crashes. And if a real disaster strikes- you delete an important file and the mirroring software erases it from your backup, a burglar steals your computer, your house burns down, etc.- you have a slightly older version stored in a safe location. It’s a bit of effort, but it beats the hell out of watching your life’s work go up in smoke.
jeffreyw
@wvng: Now that’s an excellent question…worry worry, dammit I was all smug n shit.
baldheadeddork
@chuck: I’d check first if there was a firmware upgrade for the MyBook.
Can you go into BIOS and adjust the time to detect drives?
dmsilev
I told you, you need to sacrifice a goat to the computer gods. Now, the gods are angry.
-dms
John O
The Tunchinator is traumatized. Also, fat.
In his mind, he deserves it.
You know how to speak cat. I’ve been out here a while. So just tell him to STFU and ignore him ’til he wants some luvin’.
Bill
Be careful John, or ol’ Tunch is gonna tear a bite outta you !
debit
Just FYI on the WD externals; should they seem to fail, don’t assume a hard drive crash. Check the power supply first. I’ve seen three instances of this in the last month.
And I too love my Macbook, but miss being able to play Dungeon Keeper II and therefore Windows 98.
Cat Lady
This is fucking brilliant. Sarah Palin’s illiterati will be all like WTF?
dmsilev
@Roger Moore:
Repeated for emphasis.
Another strategy is to use an external drive for nightly backups, and open an account with one of the online backup places (eg mozy.com) that you update weekly or thereabouts.
Mac users should, at the barest minimum, be using Time Machine with a USB drive. I don’t know enough about the available Windows options to recommend anything, but I’m sure someone here can chime in with specific software suggestions.
-dms
Roger Moore
@wvng:
I have restored my computer from a data-only backup plus a clean install from the original media. I’ve only done it as part of a planned upgrade, so the backup was only hours old, but I’m confident that it would work if I needed it to.
soonergrunt
@wvng: I’ve done it. Get a program like Acronis True Image (worth the money).
The key is to create a new image just about weekly and to check it’s integrity when you make it. Keep the two most recent images available. Also backup your documents on a regular basis.
If you’ve got a spare computer sitting around with decent specs, think about upgrading the hard drive space on it and putting Windows Home Server on it. It will back up several computers as well as make media management a snap.
eco2geek
@wvng: Yes, several times. Acronis rocks. It helps if your backups are more or less current. :-) It also helps if you have disk partitioning software that you know how to use.
Personally, I’ve got a fixin’ to use a Linux distribution as my main OS from now on and never buy Windows again.
cleek
for backups, i do the aforementioned semi-weeklies of all three PCs on our networks to the local RAID 5. then once a month i do a full backup to a portable USB drive that i keep in a safety deposit box (used to keep it at work… but since i don’t have a job…). i use EMC Retrospect to handle the backups – totally automated and hassle-free.
debit
Holy crap. A commercial just made me cry.
Comrade Darkness
@Cat Lady: Dang! It’s not for sale on Amazon, I wanted to see where it ranked. But omg, Going Rogue is priced at $9, new!? It’s not even released and it’s already remaindered?
Will
A terabyte is never gonna hold all that porn.
tim
thanks for the reminder to pull out my external and perform back-up’s.
baldheadeddork
@wvng:
It all depends on how you do the backup. I recommend the KISS rule for planning backups, but you can make it a lot more complicated.
The only things I back up are the files I can’t replace. If a drive fries or Windows gets FUBAR’ed for whatever reason, I can replace everything in the operating system and all of my program files by just reinstalling the programs on my computer. So I don’t back up anything in the registry, any Windows settings, or any program stuff.
I do a daily backup of all our computers documents files, e-mails and browser settings. When it’s time to do a recovery or reinstall after upgrading the OS, it’s just a matter of copying the documents file from the backup onto the same folder on the drive. Firefox and Thunderbird have import functions to bring in all of your emails, account information, settings and preferences.
The worst part of this will be waiting if you have a lot of files and a USB external hard drive. An external drive with an ethernet connection can save you a lot of time. If you’re buying a terabyte-class drive because you need the space, get one with ethernet.
I think the best way to do a backup if you have multiple computers is to buy a Windows Home Server box. It takes less than an hour to set one up for your home network, then you can stuff it in a closet or under a desk and let it run 24/7. They use very little power and they’ll automatically backup all of the computers on your network – including Macs. And it has a very good restoration system.
If you have an old PC laying around, MS also sells the Home Server software for around $100. Any computer made in the last decade has enough power to run Home Server. Just put in new hard drives and set it up.
soonergrunt
@Comrade Darkness: That was the intended release price all along-paperback-according to TPM.
Comrade Darkness
@soonergrunt: It says hardcover, list price $28.99. Not that $9 isn’t closer to the right price for it, no matter the format.
cleek
it’s free, if you subscribe to Townhall magazine!
Brian J
I know next to nothing about the technical aspects of computers, so perhaps my question is redundant and I don’t realize it, but you have to wonder why Microsoft doesn’t make this stuff as easy as possible. I mean, it’s not as if the company has a lack of resources. Are those in charge of these products so dense and so insulated that they have no idea how frustrated people get, or do they just not care, because they figure that they have such a commanding market share that those switching to something else won’t make much of a difference?
Left Coast Tom
@cleek: I could go for free if they pay for shipping. I’ll toss it straight into my recycle bin (I assume we’re discussing Going Rogue and not Going Rouge), and my town’s recycling rate will go up. Win-win.
soonergrunt
@Comrade Darkness: At $9.00 it price competitive with Palin’s book. Maybe that’s the point.
Comrade Darkness
@baldheadeddork: Network Attached Storage is the more brain-dead recommendation out of what you said, and it has the hard drive upgrade built in. We use a bit of both old pcs with linux and time capsules. But, really there is no excuse for not having lots of copies of your stuff.
Bits are ephemeral but are also easy to duplicate as many times as you want.
Comrade Darkness
@soonergrunt: I was actually talking about Palin’s book on amazon getting severely marked down. Going Rouge (the book of essays) isn’t on amazon at all, sadly.
baldheadeddork
@Roger Moore: There are some problems with your suggestion to exchange drives between home and work. That is a major offense under our IT policies because putting your hard drive on our network means any viruses or spyware you have at home can get into your employer’s systems. Just as important, allowing workers to back up their important work files to personal drives means they can walk out the front door with any file that they can access on our network. The only way this works is if you have a non-networked computer at work and you own all of the intellectual property in your company. For everyone else, this can cause a huge security breach of your company’s network and possibly/probably cost you your job if you’re caught doing it.
But all of the recommendations to get a backup outside of your house is really good advice. An online backup service is the easiest and most reliable, but you’ll have to pay around $50 a year. We keep a DVD backup of our really important documents in our safe deposit box and I change them out a couple of times a year, and I keep DVD’s of stuff like the music files in my truck.
J in WA
@Brian J:
I’m no fan of Microsoft products (I’ve become a Mac fanboi, apparently), but on this point you have to feel a little sorry for MS. The underlying problem out there is the myriad array of truly crappy PC hardware, and the scores of diverse add-on hardware like video cards, 3rd-party memory, etc. It’s impossible for Microsoft to write and test all the drivers that they need to make it all work and to get it right more than “most of the time.” A secondary issue is that upgrading (versus just installing) is always problematic, since you’re not starting with a clean slate. Some of the leftover state in that old OS can really trigger some evil demons in the new OS, and of course everybody’s previous state is different. (Back to the “Microsoft can’t test every possibility” bit, only worse.) But they care — oh boy do they care. A pissed off customer is one who might try out linux, or (horrors) switch to Apple.
Apple has a true advantage here, since (1) they make all their own hardware, and can therefore tightly control and limit the devices that they have to support, and (2) MacOS X is based on one of the oldest and most stable unix lineages (it was venerable back in 1989 when I first came across it, and has only been further stabilized and improved since that time).
Comrade Darkness
@Brian J: You can read what Microsoft did to my nice, easy to use, never failed, cloud-based cell phone, while simultaneously bungling their overall mobile OS strategy here. Might help answer your question. Or open new ones, perhaps.
dr. luba
@dmsilev: “Mac users should, at the barest minimum, be using Time Machine with a USB drive.”
Firewire is much nicer and faster, and minimally more expensive. I have a 2 TB WD drive to back up my 1 TB iMac via Time Machine (which is just awesome, especially the Star Trek screen).
I have……errr, had……..my iTunes library on a separate external drive (from previous iMac), with a copy on a second drive. Who knew that both drives would fail within days of each other? Luckily, most of it is on my iPod (Senuti rocks) and back-up DVDs. It was time to clean up and rebuild that library anyway, all 24,000 tracks. Sigh.
Ash Can
Speaking of getting severely marked down, has anyone booked Palin to speak lately?
gwangung
Heh.
Time Capsule. Automatic backups hourly/weekly/monthly.
Portable HD at home to back up datafiles.
Portable HD at work for offsite backup of datafiles.
Am contemplating a Time Capsule in a THIRD place for added security and peace of mind.
Left Coast Tom
@baldheadeddork:
My experience is sort of reverse…it’s work systems that tend to have virii.
Though as a home Mac user I guess I should just roll my eyes and sigh here…
baldheadeddork
@Comrade Darkness: I thought of that but I haven’t used a consumer-level NAS and I didn’t want to recommend one because I don’t know how comprehensive it was and how easy it is to restore data.
Do you have a favorite?
cleek
@dr. luba:
OMG.
the power supply on my RAID box died a few months back, taking my 15K song collection with it. i was in total panic mode before i learned that i could just pop the drives into a new enclosure.
—
i’m using a NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ right now. it’s small, quiet, comes with Retrospect for backups, supports a bunch of different RAID schemes, has automatic power on/off scheduling, etc.. i love it.
gnomedad
So take some video already. Either he’ll shut up to spite you or you’ll greatly entertain your readership. Win / win.
geg6
That’s two Chinese threads today. I’m beginning to think it’s not Obama who is like Mao, but John Cole.
Comrade Darkness
@baldheadeddork: Time Capsule or the HP MediaSmart. Both support Time Machine on the mac and PC file sharing in windows.
@baldheadeddork: I assumed he meant exchanging drives just to store the data offsite, out of the rain. Not to plug it in when it got there. You can also exchange drives with a friend who lives across town, but you may want to do that only if you encrypt your backups, depending on what you use your computer for.
The Grand Panjandrum
Today was a great day for veterans:
MikeJ
Bitsy: 4876
Rufus: 4804
gwangung
@The Grand Panjandrum: Um, no real accomplishments for “that one”, huh?
Comrade Luke
I fucking hate the fucking Yankees.
MikeJ
@gwangung: Just like Bush. No difference really. Or so I’ve been led to believe.
Laura W
@MikeJ: I’m disappointed in you. See geg6 at 65. I was all set to run with it until I saw you here.
Take it!
Comrade Kevin
@MikeJ: woo-hoo!
Comrade Darkness
I lost track somewhere. Why did John start this upgrade? Was he bored and tempting the gods, or just bored?
Max
So, I usually park in the driveway of my house, but I came home for just an hour, so I parked on the street and my car got hit. Grrr. I hear a loud noise when I was in the house, and looked out and saw a van driving down the road, so I know it was that van. I am tempted to drive the neighborhood looking for the damaged van.
Thankfully, my car is drive-a-ble and I’m insured, but I will have to pay the deductible and just deal with the hassle. I’m headed to DC for a job interview, so I’ll deal when I get back.
I’m choosing to take this as a good omen about the job, because right before I got the promotion that brought me to the Bay Area, I was rear-ended.
I hope the owner of the van gets toxic karmic energy from this.
BP in MN
@Comrade Luke:
I just came to the site to see if someone would share my hatred of the fucking Yankees. Glad to see the hatred carries on.
Comrade Luke
@BP in MN:
WTF was that call that gave Posada a walk? Ridiculous.
General Winfield Stuck
No brainer, Anybody that’s ever drunk the stuff knows it’s bad news.
Concerned Citizen
I hate the Yankees. God damn 6 run inning. GRRRR..
FYI, Never trust the windows upgrade. It never works. Fresh install is the only way. Of course, then you have to buy new copies of any software you no longer have CD’s for (or are no longer compatible with the OS). But such is life.
Comrade Luke
Thank god Jeter has the range of a lamp post…
Comrade Kevin
Holy Grail is on IFC right now…
Comrade Luke
Damn.
What a game.
Tattoosydney
@MikeJ:
Woot! I can’t vote any harder, dammit…
Is Rufus the only serious competition?
ruemara
I was tidying up the last 2 video projects I did on the terabyte drive and I saw there was 736 gigs left despite 3 hours of videos (multi camera shots, AE titling footage, etc) on it. It was so happy and beautiful I put my 500gig drive next to it so I could be even happier. Welcome to nerdvana, JC.
Fulcanelli
Apparently somebody was looking stake the vibe and enhance the Chi at the future site of Dubya’s presidential library, SMU, in Texas:
Nazi Looted Art Found At Future Site of Bush Presidential Library.
Guess who else had stolen art in his library? Hitler!
MikeJ
I don’t know how to check the others. Somebody else posted a link to Rufus’ total and it stayed in my browser history. Bitsy has been running within 150 f Rufus for a few days now. I have no idea how any others are doing.
Comrade Luke
Enjoying watching Yankee player’s faces changing from smug to bemused…
MikeJ
Here’s the real dog at that site:
Error writing file ‘C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\MY15F8.tmp’ (Errcode: 28)
53 :
54 :
55 : SELECT id FROM entries WHERE active = 1 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT #start_record#, #records_per_page#
56 :
57 :
Cold Fusion on IIS. Smell the fail.
Concerned Citizen
I enjoy watching Damon trying to get the ball to the infield.
bago
@wvng: I restored a lab full of 60 or so servers 4 times a day at times. Disk Imaging is handy if you keep them up to date.
bago
@Roger Moore: You can also do cloud backup.
Concerned Citizen
Mariano Rivera is coming in.
metalgirl
I discovered a few days ago that my computer (xmas gift from geek boyfriend in 12/08 with vista) had not been backed up since 12/08!! I had a mini-freak out. I own a RAID NAS drive that is being used by several computers for backups but the backup sw that came with vista only ran once! Geek guy worked on it immediately. I’ve had lightening hit in my back yard a few years ago that fried everything electronic in my house (but, thank goodness, not my hard drives). Must have backups!
Good luck John and so glad all pets are safe :)
bago
@Max: Hi Max! I just got a contract out in DC too. Working in medical software. It’s neat to be in the eye of the storm.
Concerned Citizen
Why don’t you use Linux? I’ve been using it for 5 years and never have problems with the upgrades.
I spend lots of time fixing machines for other people and it’s hard to get them to switch. Just curious.
freelancer (itouch)
@Fulcanelli:
Jesus I couldve sworn that link was taking me to the onion.
Comrade Darkness
@Fulcanelli: Maybe the Nazis sent it to Grandpa Prescott Bush all those years ago in thanks for helping launder their money, even after the war started. That’s worth a few looted oil paintings, at least.
Concerned Citizen
the Yankees lose!! the Yankees lose!! the Yankees lose!!
Comrade Darkness
@Tattoosydney: Rufus is CHEATING. Or, well, he has an entire fracking TV station in Tallahassee promoting him. Fortunately the station site is down, heh, but you can see it on the google cache link here
Martin
Actually, you have to test your backups. The list of corporations that have fucked themselves by backing up religiously only to find out that none of the backups were good is staggeringly long.
Comrade Luke
Better find something to do with that champagne.
Max
@bago: Congrats! I hope to be as lucky.
Maus
Why doesn’t congress ever get anything (good) done? There are so many members! It should be so easy! :)
The Other Steve
Life would be so much easier if we allowed Nazi Dictators to decide what hardware we should be allowed to purchase. Then the OS would only have to work with a limited selection of hardware. Sure we’ll have to pay more, and it’ll take years for the really cool stuff to become available for us geeks to use, but life will be simpler.
Hopefully some day Steve Jobs will be declared God Emperor and this dream will come to pass.
Jon H
I’m backing up (via Time Machine) to two 1TB external FW800 drives, configured as a mirrored array.
I was on one 1 TB drive, but then the penny dropped that it was actually two 500GB drives in one box, so if either 500GB drive dies, the whole thing dies. So I picked up the second 1TB drive and set up the mirroring.
Chad N Freude
@The Other Steve: Why just Nazi dictators? Why not communist dictators? Why not soseeAlicet dictators? Why not Latin American dictators? Why do you favor the Nazis?