The good news is—Carbonite.
I’ve pulled the critical file down off the cloud and have put it on laptop #2. We are running. They promise me a new drive by Tuesday. Dell diagnosed over chat, on another computer, while I read off instructions and Jane pushed buttons, and yes, it is most sincerely dead. The good news is, again, Carbonite. I don’t have e-mail at the moment, but I do have The File.
Jane and I will have no trouble installing the new drive, which will come in with Win 7, with Win 7 disks, in case of screw-up, and we will just have to sit through endless downloads of updates and patches while THAT gets organized, but hey, it sure beats the lightning strike on a prior book, in which Lynn and Jane were down at Kinko’s scanning in pages and I was reconstituting text from a very bad (couldn’t tell double ll from H or m or whatever).
If you have critical stuff on your computer, Carbonite is a real good idea.
It must be one of Those Weeks. I took my car in for routine service (it gets its first smog check this year – and I’ve been driving it for 14) and it needed new tires and struts.
Yes, make sure you have at least a couple backups; DH favors CrashPlan for cloud backup, plus we have a 3 TB standalone drive for belt-and-suspenders security. We can, in case of catastrophe, unplug the standalone and throw it in a backpack if we have to evacuate in front of a tsunami or hurricane. We use Acronis on a regular basis to copy the contents of our personal computers to the standalone.
We had to restore the contents of a photographer’s laptop from Carbonite. It was all there, but even with our fast internet connection, it took 3 days to download.
I’ve used Carbonite at least 3, if not 4 times to completely restore a system. It’s well worth the money.
It’s a little slow in copying large files but I just have to force those up to the cloud before shutting down.
My 17 year old Caddie had the fan for the air conditioning die (gotta have it running here in the Okies). It didn’t die gracefully but pulled down the battery while doing it. An expensive fix but I don’t feel like getting a new car. It’s probably got another 5 years or so on it.
One of those weeks!
It must indeed be one of those weeks. We had a server crash, and discovered a bunch of bad sectors on a hard drive. Unfortunately, our entire 26 years of books was stored on a VHD (virtual hard drive) on that drive, and that VHD was unmountable. Gone, couldn’t be read! (yes, most of it was recoverable from either external backups or other sources, but it would have been very, very painful in some cases.) After much sweating and not a little fear, I was able to read the VHD using BitRecover’s VHD Recovery software. It took it all day, but it got EVERYTHING back. Absolutely the best $99 I’ve spent in a long time.
I also recommend CrashPlan. It lets you back up to other computers that you or your friends own as well as their cloud service. So you can back up one directory with critical files to all of your computers, and back everything up to the cloud.
Backups are a wonderful thing, aren’t they? I lost the boot sector on the hard drive on my work laptop a couple of years ago. Dell supplied a new hard drive and I discovered the third party software I’d been using to backup with couldn’t restore because it couldn’t find its database. Fortunately I had been able to copy all the data from the drive that failed onto a NAS drive in addition to having Carbonite, so nothing was lost. I no longer use that backup program, needless to say. Windows backup and Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copy are my local backup tools of choice these days.
Oh yeah backups are important. I am in the middle of my second novel and I keep everything backed up to OneDrive. In fact I store my working copy in the onedrive and work on it from there. That way I can get to it from any device. I write a fair amount of my iPad. I finished the first manuscript and have a copy in a couple of local hard drives because I am only doing editing on that piece. But I still edit directly in the OneDrive copy. I use personal OneDrive as the business version is much more clumsy.
Past time for a new avatar, so I chose this to mark POD-4.1 achieving “Golden Egg” status yesterday. (POD is an acronym for Paul’s Own Distribution.) I built it from scratch, the “Iron Horse”, and pushed it through three successive iterations, “Brass Monkey”, “Silver Sword”, and finally “Golden Egg”, of fixing glitches and testing to make reasonably sure all 380 constituent “packages” can be cloned to make a new, running, system with minimum hassle.
Why? Because I can! Because although it is made of widely available FOSS, it’s not part of any particular “monoculture”, presenting a known “attack surface”. It’s not “safe”, but it’s “safer”. FOSS has flaws, but they tend to get fixed as soon as noticed, and I don’t have to wait for anybody to apply them. I have an update to the network encryption package to be installed now.
POD-5.0 is now an “Iron Horse”, being built for 64-bit CPUs. (-3 & -4 work on 686 on up (“pierce” here is a 64-bit Core-2 Conroe), -1 & -2 on “Classic” Pentiums or better, and -0 runs on 386/486es.)