I had a disk hard disk crash. The Mac is sitting at the apple store getting new guts installed. Blogging, working on R etc will be light until Monday. During this intervals please be aware:
- First time commenters are moderated. Their comments may take a long time before they are sprung from moderation.
- The time-out plugin is still in place. If it engages, you will see the “whoa” message. For most people this is a short time, just wait a bit. For a few people, the wait message is long.
This is an open thread, but please do behave. No name calling, insulting etc. Also, if someone insults you, please just ignore that person’s comment. That will help take away their power to derail conversations you are otherwise finding productive.
I hate it when that happens. My desktop crashed three months ago and my GPS crashed (literally, three foot drop) yesterday. At least I have my fishing numbers copied (hard copy, cd, laptop and Google). Tell Mac, get well soon.
Oh boy, now I can insult people without Lucia trying to spoil my fun.
Hmmm…. I can’t think of any insults. When opportunity knocks, I’m never ready. That’s the story of my life.
My Mac has yet to crash. My PC crashed once, and I lost some stuff. I hope Lucia is covered with external backup, and this problem doesn’t cause her a lot of grief.
Well… I’m on the backup mac now. The other one is in the shop! So, it’s going to be a little bit of a pita. Max_ok– I don’t back up as often as I ought to. So, I’ll lose some stuff. Stupid… but there you go. Not a catastrophe.
Lucia,
Best wishes on a full recovery.
Are any of the back up services that advertise appropriate for the sort of data/functions of this blog?
My bet is that a solution like that, if available, would be something many who visit your blog (including myself) would be happy to support.
“I don’t back up as often as I ought to.”
Climate Science Best Practice #2 😉
Happy Friday Everyone! 🙂
Andrew
hunter–
The blog is on a server and unaffected by anything that happened to my hard disk. It’s just that to post, comment or moderate, I need to connect to the internet. I have a hard time doing that when the mac is physically in the shop. I wrote this post from the mac store in Naperville. Later, I remembered we still had the other mac– but we’d been planning to give it to my father-in-law and Jim has removed my user. So…. I had to wait for Jim to get home to set me up as user.
So… now I can comment. But boy do I hate this keyboard!!! It’s old and the keys physically stick. I can see cat fur down in there!
Also, I use my mac to do analyses, get email, etc. You sometimes see results from those– but they aren’t technically “on the blog”.
[geek] Time Machine and/or SuperDuper!. Western Digital Elements 1 TB hard drive, $70. Won’t prevent crashes, but could help with the cleanup afterwards. Get well soon! [/geek]
Also: My hovercraft is full of eels.
Lucia,
Re: cat fur. I think you can pop the keys off their mounts with a small flat-blade screw driver, so that you can clean up (cat hair, coffee, other debris) and free any sticking keys. Your father in law will thank you; just get the keys back in their right places or your father in law will curse you. 😉
Backing up data is like voting: Backup early and backup often. I’ve never suffered a disk crash thankfully. I have so many external HDs that I guess I really don’t have an excuse if I loose data.
If I can make a suggestion in terms of hardware:
pick up one of these raid5 hard-drives. Adjust the size to your needs.
It is a four-bay, hot-swappable drive running RAID5, which saves the data using block-level striping and 2-bit parity. What that means in practice is, data access is very fast, and if one of the drives fail, you don’t lose any data (or time). Simply swap out the bad drive with a new one (while it’s still running), and it will automatically rebuild the new drive.
What I have in my office is a 6-TB + a 2 TB . I run the 2-TB using Macintosh’s “Time Machine” to keep the data off the “main drives” backed up in a secure format.
I prefer using Time Machine for my main drives because that way, the backups are done incrementally, and I can back-out changes to software in a painless manner. (RCS/CVS/SVN are painful IMO. I do use them for missing-critical software, but when you’re trying to put together an analysis script that you are only going to run one time, they are excessively intrusive, compared to just running time machine + an external drive.)
I also automatically rsync all of the data from all of the drives nightly to a remote LINUX based server using crontab (ssh-keygen is your friend), which itself stores the data on a RAID5 or RAID6 (can’t remember) disk server. But then again, we have a lot of data, and losing major chunks of it would be pretty painful as well as very embarrassing.
If money is an object, put up a tip jar, we’ll contribute.
In terms of keyboards for a Mac, this is the one I use:
Apple MB110LL/A Wired Keyboard. I keep extras around ’cause I do go through them. 😉
You can start up your Mac from an external FireWire drive (like the RAID setup Carrick mentions), if your internal drive crashes (assuming you have a backed-up System file there). But not from a USB 2.0 drive.
Dell USB keyboards will work on a Mac, others too, I suppose. Some of the more exotic keys map to different places, but it’s not tough to figure out.
SteveF–
My father in law ended up not wanting the keyboard.
All– On backups… the problem is the failure to backup up “often”. So… stuff less than 6 months old… gone. Of course. lots of that stuff is useless. But still… Yes this is stupid…. Stupidity happens more with home computers than work computers. What can I say?
I’m hunting around for things to see what I can recover. The mac store got “disk won’t mount”. So, that looks bad.
Professionals quote amounts that are more than the stuff I lost is worth. Like $800-$1000. Well… I didn’t lose $800 worth of stuff.
More like… oh… $200 worth of stuff. Depends on how I value things like “recent excel spread sheet”, “R practice files” etc. “Emails that could have been hacked! I’m asking people for their experience with things like “diskwarrior” (which claims it can get stuff off a drive that doesn’t mount. Well… maybe…)
Carrick–
Money is always some sort of object. But even if generous blog readers gave me money, I would still want to find a cost effective way to get back stuff rather than shipping a disk off to Texas or California where they might ask $2000 to get back some tiny snippet.
The guy at the mac store gave me a company’s card. They must specialize in really panicked people whose whole life revolves around getting heaven knows what off their disks. Not only that, the guy on the other end of the phone was clearly very “salesman-ish” wanting to go through the horror of losing stuff before getting to prices.
Maybe I have really precious movies on the mac? Nope. Photo– Well… there are photo’s. Nothing *precious* though. Email? Nah.I can lose that.
My view is: Oh… there are about 10 spread sheets, some R files, some .doc files and a few other things I really do hope to get back. BUT, I can reconstitute them all. So…. not really a big deal.
Carrick (Comment#70573) February 25th, 2011 at 11:09 am
If I can make a suggestion in terms of hardware:
pick up one of these raid5 hard-drives. Adjust the size to your needs.
……………
What I have in my office is a 6-TB + a 2 TB . I run the 2-TB using Macintosh’s “Time Machine†to keep the data off the “main drives†backed up in a secure format.
I endorse this, I use a 1Tbyte firewire drive to back up using Time Machine, cost less than $100. Just plug it in when the laptop comes home and it picks up where it left off.
Lucia,
Most of my files are work related, so I do try to make sure I don’t ever lose too much. Any relatively inexpensive external drive with an automatic backup every few days (say 3:00 AM) is invisible and painless. Even if your backup software isn’t sophisticated, the time involved in recovery after a crash is relatively modest. WRT recovery services: these seem to me a waste of time/money. I twice tried to recover important files from crashed discs; $500 for them to look at the drive, lots more to actually recover anything. They could recover nothing, but I was still out $500 each time. Lesson learned: back up frequently.
SteveF–
After talking to the first company and detecting heavy “marketing”, I figured something just wasn’t right in the data recovery service business. They say things like they don’t charge if you get nothing. But… that still leaves open: What if they get back some teensie-beensie meaningless thing? For all practical purpose, that’s nothing.
I got the hard disk back. I’m going to look at it *myself*. It’s probably a face plant.
Of course, all the rest of your advise is spot on and exactly what Jim and I said over breakfast. Then, we said, “oh well”. As I said: I’m just motivated enough to try to get stuff back. But if it’s lost. Well… it’s lost. Happens.
I know a “belt and suspenders” type who has two external hard drives on his computer, and he automatically backs up onto the two drives on alternate nights… even an internal and external drive failure can only cost 1 day of data loss. I didn’t have the heart to mention how a lightning strike would cook everything at once.
Lucia,
“It’s probably a face plant.”
I have no idea what this means; I must be getting very old.
SteveF–
Not to mention a fire. Obviously, if you really, really, really can’t lose stuff, you need to be sure your backups aren’t co-located with the hardware they backup.
I do have lots of things on surge protectors. Would they help? Don’t know. A long time ago, I did end up off line for 3 days owing to lightening. I can’t remember what went out, but there was a direct lightening hit to a tree and the gas main across the street. The tree died. The gas main ruptured. There was a fire. I lost power, and… something minor. Modem I think. We could have been on line sooner, but we wanted to shop and make a decent choice.
Faceplant: http://blippitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/faceplant.jpg
In many sports, a faceplant is just total failure.
Does a Mac-OS not include an automatic backup-program?
If you worry about fire etc, buy your father-in-law a My-Book-World and do your back-up to his computer; I assume you both live in an urban area with broadband.
Alexej
Sort of. But you still need to get the hardware and run the backups.
There are a zillion ways to back up. I, like many people, do stupid things sometimes.
Lucia,
Thanks for the explanation of “face plant’. I knew it by another description: the process by which a child learns why beets taste the way they do.
lucia (Comment#70588) February 25th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
There is just one way: Automatically, and daily.
And from time to time make another copy to put somewhere else.
We are getting more and more like small business users of pcs and we need to take the same precautions. Auto backup with NAS is the minimum.
Check out Bubba 2 and Bubba 3 for simple, cheap solutions.
We bought a pocket drive, put the old harddrive in, connected to the downstairs mac. The old hardrive mounted, and is visible. All key stuff is being transferred. 🙂