Rolandes Ramblings

So, in the past year and a half I hadn’t done much but study for the stupid CCIE Exam. That led to an inevitably long list of things to do, once I finally re-entered life again. One of those things on the list had been to backup all of our important data on our computer. Well, I finally set aside the time this past Saturday to get it done and old Murphy also set aside the time to pay a visit, as well.

I got a new DVD/CD burner a while back and had only installed it into the computer. I never had time to actually use it up until now. Well, I quickly found out that the Sony drive didn’t like the Sony 8x DVD-R media I was using which the box plainly listed as being supported. Go figure! It kept barfing after about a Gig of data was written with an error that said “Illegal media”.

So, after making two beautiful DVD coasters, I figured the first thing to do was search out any and all firmware/software updates for the drive and the Burner software. Within a few minutes I found that the firmware on my drive was about a year and a half and 2 releases out of date. So, I promptly downloaded the latest firmware and installed it. I then ran a simulated burn and it looked good. After about an hour and a half to two hours of screwing around with the software and hardware, I finally got down to business.

I made a long list of all the things that I had to backup and started in on it. I had about 14 Gig of MP3’s on one partition that I was using as my scratch space. So, I wanted to burn that to disc first so I could delete it and free up the scratch space I needed. Everything went just fine and I was able to burn 3 full DVD’s packed with my whole CD collection that I had converted to MP3 a couple years ago. I popped each DVD into my DVD-ROM drive to test them out and just verify that they looked good. Each one tested fine. After I put the last disc in the drive and tested it, I had to get up to go help my wife with something. When I came back, I had forgotten that I had left Explorer open and accessing that disc. I hit the eject button on the DVD drive which promptly allowed Explorer to spit out a nasty error and crash. As I tried to close down Explorer to attempt to recover the system seemed to slow to crawl and almost completely lock up. At this point, I realize I am probably going to have to reboot to recover. Crap!

I finally got Explorer to shutdown but as soon as I did that my hard drive started making this funny (not funny like a clown) clicking sound like a broken record almost. Right about then was when the panic started to set in. The machine was completely locked tighter than a drum at this point and the drive was not showing any signs that it would stop the horrible sounding clicking. Ctrl-Alt-Del did not work at all, so I hit the reset button and prayed. As the machine rebooted I could see the drive was properly detected and the OS appeared to start loading. Then came the error message: “System file missing or corrupt”. By now the hard drive is making the awful clicking sound again. Of course, now the frustration has set in and I am ready to throw it out the window. But, I remain calm as I can knowing I have one last ditch effort.

I grabbed a brand new 120GB hard drive I had sitting in the basement and I proceeded to build a new install of Win2K on it in hopes that I could boot it up with my old drive in parallel as a Slave. I was praying that somehow the data would be accessible and I could copy it to the new drive and then back it up to DVD.

Nope!

The irony of this is that a friend of ours just had this same sort of thing happen to her work laptop a few weeks ago and she called ME for help because her own IT department wasn’t offering her a solution. I told her the only option was to go to a data recovery company and pay a bunch of money and pray they could recover it. Initially she was told $1,800 for the recovery but they negotiated down to $1,000.

As the realization of my own situation started to sink in, I couldn’t believe the irony. I should have known better to already have a good backup solution in place to save this kind of expense. Anymore, the data on our computer is too important to not have archived and backed up. I just never really thought about it seriously. It is a very hard lesson learned.

So, now I am looking at getting a little Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that I can use for automated nightly backups and temporary storage etc. that I can just plug into my network and share. I am leaning towards the Buffalo Terastation which offers a 4 disk RAID 5 array with 10/100/1000 connectivity, basic folder security, an FTP server, 4 USB expansion ports for additional drives or a printer for print serving. You can’t beat the price for the space and features. For your own reference, Tom’s Hardware has a good review of the Terastation here.

So kiddies, I hope this has taught you all an important lesson and that you have learned from it. Do as I say, not as I do!