« A nice package? | Main | You want to do what? »
August 05, 2005
Rejoyce, for the technology gods are benevolent this day.
Please back your data up. This has not been fun.
Earlier in the week, they were wrathful, smiting my hard drive, consigning it to the demons of head crashes.
Knowing of Orpheus and equipped with a USB drive cradle, I made several attempts to see if anything at all could be read from it.
Every now and then it would actually spin up without (too much) crunching, which was slightly promising. The partitions are NTFS, and attaching it to a Windows PC proved useless. As soon as it mounted, Windows would try and write something to it - not helpful with a sick drive - crashing it again almost instantly.
Mounting it on the Mac laptop (yes, I do have a Mac and I do like it. It's IDE (Xcode) is very neat and excellent for MUD coding), proved more of a success, as it mounts NTFS partitions as read only. It would last anywhere between five seconds to two minutes before starting to grind again. Two documents were recovered.
But, by disconnecting it for 24 hours as soon as it started grinding, the following day, it would work a little longer.
I can only surmise the moisture inside that was causing the stiction and head crashes was slowly dissapating. Today, I was able to retrieve almost five hundred megabytes of data. Looking at this, which must have been the equivilant of gazing on the face of Eurydice, the demons returned, squealing for the data that was escaping the abyss. Or it may have been the heads scraping the platters for the last time. Whichever the case may be, any further hopes are abandoned.
Still missing is some experimental bitflag code, a few other test libraries that I wrote, and a substantial collection of PDFs and references, but I am well satisfied. All the important documents that were there are retrieved, all the email and most of the photographs (yes, and that one) are recovered.
It's time to look at home backup solutions. Burning a set of 15-20 backup CDs is not a workable solution, as something that is so inherently time consuming will not be done often enough. Knowing myself, it would be backed up every four weeks for the first three months, and three years hence when it crashes, I'll have 34 month old backups. A DVD burner is an option, but again, backups would run to several discs.
The currently favoured solution is Norton Ghost 9 (not the buggy 2003) and an external HDD. However, any suggestions are welcome, as it'll be a while before I can actually buy it.
For now, I'm going to go burn what I have recovered to CD.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at August 5, 2005 11:14 AM
Comments