Evolv-ing Thread

[BillW50]

I think I've stumbled on the ultimate backup system for the boot drive of a PC. buy a second, identical drive. Being identical is just for simplicity but it does need to be at least big enough to hold all the data on the operational drive. Clone the operational drive to the second, spare, drive on a weekly, or more often, basis depending on your own activities. If the operational drive ever fails, you're back in business with a quick drive swap.

I've been doing this since 2003. Sorry, was I supposed to say something? I absolutely love this method. For any reason the drive fails, update screws up, files corrupt, or whatever. I am not screwed at all. In less than a minute, I can swap out the drive with a cloned one. So I am back and running in no time.

This laptop is also is popped into a docking station. I have eight of the same model laptop and two spare docks. If needed, I could swap out a whole laptop in seconds. Or use them independently as laptops. The eight either has Windows XP, 7, or 8.1. And one has two distros of Linux on it (dual boot and I hate dual boot machines and that is my only one). Swapping laptops is like swapping CDs (just 5lbs heavier).

My plan was to buy three drives and just rotate them. Yes more expensive than buying a huge backup drive. Although before 2008 I was using regular hard drives and just kept buying more drives. Since 2008, I was using SSD and I kept buying them too. Okay I might rotate three a year and then buy three more for the next year. YMMV

 

[TrollDragon]

I ran rsync on all our web, mail and DNS servers to a main backup server. I do like automated incremental backups over ssh.
rsync

 

[Rossum]

I wanted to use the Acronis cloud service but there is no real way to manage the data.

Nope. No way, no how is any of my data going on any "cloud" service.

The problem I have with "a big spinny", and I have multiple multi-terrabyte disks, is that when they fail you lose a LOT of data.

Sure, but this is strictly a convenience backup. My real working data is already backed up, and I always have a laptop with me that I can use should the deskop (that I much prefer working on) fail. If I lose the drive in any of my systems, I can just slap a new SSD into any of my computers and re-install Windows, plus re-install everything else I use, but doing that is a royal PITA, and I'll find stuff I forgot to re-install for a week or two. Thus my desire to have complete images that I can restore. If the big spinny with those images on it fails, OK, I lose those "convenience" images. No big deal, I'll order a new one and make more.

 

[SlickWilly]

Nope. No way, no how is any of my data going on any "cloud" service.


Sure, but this is strictly a convenience backup. My real working data is already backed up, and I always have a laptop with me that I can use should the deskop (that I much prefer working on) fail. If I lose the drive in any of my systems, I can just slap a new SSD into any of my computers and re-install Windows, plus re-install everything else I use, but doing that is a royal PITA, and I'll find stuff I forgot to re-install for a week or two. Thus my desire to have complete images that I can restore. If the big spinny with those images on it fails, OK, I lose those "convenience" images. No big deal, I'll order a new one and make more.

I agree, I won't use any cloud service, don't trust em, never will. My wife asked me to do the firmware update on her iphone a while back, once it was done I took a look at the settings, I was stunned at the numerous setting where her data was being sent to apple's cloud service, all of them ON by default. I had to go into each program, email, contacts, texts and so forth and turn the cloud upload off and I also had to turn off cloud settings elsewhere, not sure I ever got them all. No kidding there must have been around 40 of them to turn off. On top of that the voice service was also enabled for almost every program. And they use your finger print to unlock it, now I see they use face recognition to unlock. Hell with just an iphone they have access to everything, everything you say, type, web search, face recognition data captured, finger prints, photos and video's from both the front and rear camera, GPS tracking of everywhere you go and when, I bet they are working on putting a DNA sensor in those things next so they can get your DNA. I'll never use an iphone! Talk about a CIA, FBI and NSA dream machine, and on top of it your paying for the phone and service!!! I'll keep my old outdated android with the camera's taped over, a phone I can pull the battery out of when not in use.

Which reminds me, while driving down Rt 17 in Binghamton, NY last week I noticed camera's on every light pole all the way down the route on each side of the road, there must have been one every 50-75 yards. And at the on and off ramps for both the east and west bound I counted 12 of them covering every foot of the roads. Once you get in the city it was the same thing, camera's everywhere up on the poles! Have any idea how many monitors it would take to watch all those camera's? For God's sake we're talking about Binghamton, not NYC!!! They must have a ton of people watching all of them and a hell of a big data center, I'd like to know how much all that crap is costing the tax payers! We need to start looking up more, it's really getting ridiculous!

 

[tiburonfirst]

 

[dwcraig1]

New hard drive cloned and installed smoothly, about 3 hours to clone it, maybe the for $ software would be faster but one can't expect to much speed with USB 2.0.

 

[awsum140]

Macrim seems to be the fastest free cloning software. Western Digital links to Acronis free cloning, I think. Not sure about Seagate. I used Macrim when I cloned the boot drive in my desktop. Took about 20 minutes for about 80 gigs, cloning on USB 3.0, physical swap and reboot on the new drive. The desktop case has slide in drive bays so it's really quick to swap/install a drive. The biggest hassle is getting another SATA cable installed for a new drive with the video cards hanging over those ports. Last time I added a drive I populated all the SATA ports with cables, just in case.

My purpose for cloud storage of video clips would be to get them off site and out of reach. If some miscreants ever get in here and swipe stuff I'm guessing they'd either swipe the desktop or trash it which would eliminate the video evidence. There's just too much video to back it up reasonably with all the cameras recording 24/7. Motion clips "only" generate about 400 gigs a day and age them out at twelve hours so it's only about 200 gigs. If those clips are on a "cloud" or some other remote storage area, they would still be available to identify the creeps. I'll probably end up stashing a NAS somewhere else in the house that is unlikely to be found under those kind of circumstances.

It's not only the phone manufacturers that are snooping. Have a look at the permissions when you install an app on Android stuff. I went to install a config program for a video camera on my phone and it wanted to access everything on the phone and give me a protorscope to boot. Sent the camera back. The consumer grade cameras are all going that way, Andoid/IOS app, cloud based recording, super intrusive, to configure them, but the higher end ones will maintain a web interface due to the complexity of configuring them properly.

 

[CMD-Ky]

Wow! I did not realize WordPefect still existed. I was never a fan. I stuck with WordStar until the mid 1990s and then switched to Word, like just about everyone else.

LibreOffice can supposedly open WordPerfect documents and is available for Linux (as well as Windows).

WordPerfect is still going, I never liked Word but Excel - very nice. About the only people still using WP are old lawyers, dinosaurs all. The young ones all use Word. I tried Open Office but it did not like WordPerfect, Ill give LibreOffice a shot.
I used WordStar until '89. I really like it, loved "dot" commands. My favorite version was 5.5; however, when Windows became mandatory because some research software stopped supporting DOS I was forced kicking, screaming and cursing to begin using Windows. I did not want or need a graphical interface. I had to find a new word processing program. The WordStar program never did Windows well, in fact, I thought it was terrible.

 

[Rossum]

About the only people still using WP are old lawyers, dinosaurs all.

Ah yes, that makes perfect sense. I bet they clung to their IBM Selectrics longer than just about anyone else as well.

 

[CMD-Ky]

Ah yes, that makes perfect sense. I bet they clung to their IBM Selectrics longer than just about anyone else as well.

I gave up the simple typewriter very early and went to a mag card device that was pretty slick at the time. I was computerized in '84 with an IBM XT 8088 (if memory has not completely failed me) and a 10 meg drive, I thought that I was flying high with Lotus 1-2-3 as a spreadsheet and WordStar for word processing and that huge very fast hard drive. Good times, it was fun, I couldn't wait for the next version of DOS and WS to come out.

 

[awsum140]

I've said this before but it's funny how things have gone with computers. I have more RAM in my desktop machine, 32 gigs, than we had drive space in an Enterprise class server when I started in IT. Of course, coax was the medium for networks then, too. On the other hand, you didn't need 50 gigs for the operating system back then either.

 

[Rossum]

I've said this before but it's funny how things have gone with computers. I have more RAM in my desktop machine, 32 gigs, than we had drive space in an Enterprise class server when I started in IT. Of course, coax was the medium for networks then, too. On the other hand, you didn't need 50 gigs for the operating system back then either.

Yep, CPU chips have more cache now than some computers that I've used had total storage at any given moment (i.e. without swapping floppies). I was in hog heaven when my employer finally sprung for a hard drive for my computer. It had 15 megabytes of storage and cost well over $1000. I also remember the very first hard drive I bought for myself with my own money. 70 megabytes and it cost $700, only $10 a megabyte!

Going back even further, over Christmas break during my Freshman year in college, the Moore School of Electrical Engineering (where digital computers were more-or-less invented) ripped out their old mainframe and replaced it with a brand-spanking new one. They were real proud of the fact that it had an entire megabyte of physical memory. It also had a number of hard drives with replaceable platter assemblies. I don't recall the capacity, but they looked a bit like washing machines:

 

[ShamrockPat]

hard drives with replaceable platter assemblies. I don't recall the capacity, but they looked a bit like washing machines:

Same here, and depending on the read/writes sometimes they could gyrate like an off balanced washer. I've kept 1 platter of 5 in a 20Mb drive that had a crash.

 

[Rossum]

Same here, and depending on the read/writes sometimes they could gyrate like an off balanced washer. I've kept 1 platter of 5 in a 20Mb drive that had a crash.

Yeah, at one point I had a 1 GB full-height SCSI drive that could my whole tower shake.

Of course some people have make good use of such effects:

 

[SlickWilly]

I took typing as a class in school, back when communicates with someone was either by land line or mailing a postcard or letter, if you had a private phone line your family was well to do. When you spoke your phone number you'd say something like "Sky Line 3-1318", that was our home number when I was a kid. I can remember when they built Interstates across the country, we watched as they built the bridges for Rt 81 going through NY, how many know why they built the Interstates? Entertainment was a choice of channels 3, 5 & 9 on your B&W TV (channel 9 came in on a good day), going to the drive-in or Saturday matinees at the theater and of course you had your library card, usually we spent most of our playtime outside.

In school we had a wood shop class and trade skill classes that included for the boys, machine shop class with mills, lathes and all the machinery found in a machine shop, auto mech class and Ag class for the farmers kids. The vast majority of kids were expected to be blue collar workers, made sense back then to teach them some manual labor trade skills. Now kids go to computer class and don't know which end of a hammer to hold or how to install a faucet.

I took wood shop and machine shop, I once took Dad's old shotgun to school on the bus so I could fix it in machine shop, another time I took my BB pistol to school, no one ever blinked an eye at a kid with a gun in school. That was back when they had rifle ranges in the basements of schools and taught kids how to handle firearms and hit a bullseye after school. They did that knowing if you came of age and were drafted you had a much better chance of surviving of you grew up knowing how to shoot and hit what your aiming at. On the opening day of deer season the majority of boys 14 and up would take the day off and hunt with their fathers.

Yup, times have changed and fast, but then again my grandparents told me about growing up using horse and buggies, outhouses, kerosene lanterns for lighting and if you wanted to eat vegetables you grew and canned them, that seemed pretty strange to me as a kid.

 

[awsum140]

I remember slogging trays of punch cards, washing machine dives were a luxury. I had a combo floppy drive, a slot for a 5-1/4 and a 3-1/2 disk in the same, full height, bay. Now that was livin'. In fact, I still do have a 3-1/2" drive in one machine and have actually booted it to DOS 6.22 recently. Ah, the good old days when men were men and computers were slow.

 

[SlickWilly]

One of my buddy's used to call DOS "The Dark Side" kind of stuck with me over the years. I remember the first computer we bought, a Tandy 1000. The late nights scouring the manual trying to figure out the correct commands to type in to get it to work. Then one day I found a floppy with Leisure Suit Larry, my first video game! Of course then I had to spring for a joy stick! I'd be up until 2 AM on a work night trying to get to the next level and the wife would yell at me "Turn that off! You have to go to work in the morning!!"

 

[TrollDragon]

One of my buddy's used to call DOS "The Dark Side" kind of stuck with me over the years. I remember the first computer we bought, a Tandy 1000. The late nights scouring the manual trying to figure out the correct commands to type in to get it to work. Then one day I found a floppy with Leisure Suit Larry, my first video game! Of course then I had to spring for a joy stick! I'd be up until 2 AM on a work night trying to get to the next level and the wife would yell at me "Turn that off! You have to go to work in the morning!!"

Loved all the Sierra games.. LSL, Kings Quest, Space Quest those were the days.
Ultima, Wizardry, Questron and a slew of SSI games like Eye of the Beholder. Way too many dungeons mapped and hours spent.

 

[BillW50]

Leisure Suit Larry! Where have you been?

 

[SlickWilly]

Space Quest, that was the other one I had. Still have the Tandy, printer, DOS, games, everything, wonder if it would fire up?