RIP Olimar
The weekend once again reminded me of the fragility of life. One minute you can be happily watching a movie with your trusty friend, the next minute..... DEAD!
Olimar, david's iBook (purchased the same time as my dear friend, Willow) was happily playing us a dvd on saturday night, and as we went to put on the next movie, we heard a strange noise. It sounded like the fan was going crazy, so he turned it off to let it cool down.
But then when he tried to boot it up again- NOTHING! NADA! the hard drive died in the ass :(
poor thing was stressed out all weekend, about the cost to repair and the possibility of having lost EVERYTHING on his iBook... however he has a good chance of recovery most of the data (turns out the girlfriend of a guy at work, had the exact same problem. the hard drive was dead, but getting a replacement one and then hooking up the old one, externally, meant she was able to save everything)
It got me worried about my own computer and the chance that a computer malfunction to mean I lose YEARS of photos and my whole internet history (past layouts and whatnot). The internet sucks in the way that it doesn't really RECORD anything. So many sites have been lost over the years... the domain expires, the content is lost in cyberspace. The internet wayback machine is great, but obviously it hasn't saved everything. I can't view Muntedmess.net in the wayback machine because that stupid company snatched up my domain and put results on it. *sniff*
I think I'm going to buy an external hard drive, as well as a dvd burner (again, keep it external so I can use it with my iBook and PC). I'll probably check out UMart, but dear Muntedmess readers - is there any advice you can offer me? I value your combined tech knowledge, and appreciate any opinions, suggestions and advice you can offer! You have helped me out many times before.
Olimar, david's iBook (purchased the same time as my dear friend, Willow) was happily playing us a dvd on saturday night, and as we went to put on the next movie, we heard a strange noise. It sounded like the fan was going crazy, so he turned it off to let it cool down.
But then when he tried to boot it up again- NOTHING! NADA! the hard drive died in the ass :(
poor thing was stressed out all weekend, about the cost to repair and the possibility of having lost EVERYTHING on his iBook... however he has a good chance of recovery most of the data (turns out the girlfriend of a guy at work, had the exact same problem. the hard drive was dead, but getting a replacement one and then hooking up the old one, externally, meant she was able to save everything)
It got me worried about my own computer and the chance that a computer malfunction to mean I lose YEARS of photos and my whole internet history (past layouts and whatnot). The internet sucks in the way that it doesn't really RECORD anything. So many sites have been lost over the years... the domain expires, the content is lost in cyberspace. The internet wayback machine is great, but obviously it hasn't saved everything. I can't view Muntedmess.net in the wayback machine because that stupid company snatched up my domain and put results on it. *sniff*
I think I'm going to buy an external hard drive, as well as a dvd burner (again, keep it external so I can use it with my iBook and PC). I'll probably check out UMart, but dear Muntedmess readers - is there any advice you can offer me? I value your combined tech knowledge, and appreciate any opinions, suggestions and advice you can offer! You have helped me out many times before.
12 Comments:
At April 11, 2006 9:27 PM, Iris said…
Yikes that really suck =/ I'm always SO scared my computer is gonna die, even though it's only 1.5 years old. Thing is, I think I take good care of it.. but I dunno if I actually do lol. Getting an external HD sounds like a good plan. I should definitely get one. Esp for the millions of photos! And I think in the end it's cheaper than burning things to DVD
At April 12, 2006 6:39 AM, Strongblade! said…
For archiving a web site, I found that Web Devil was pretty good. It has a 15 day trial. Another was called Web Dumper but it only allows for 100 items before you have to register.
At April 12, 2006 10:36 AM, James said…
I know people who have had good experience shopping at eyo.com.au and auspcmarket.com.au
JR
At April 12, 2006 10:14 PM, MichaelF said…
An external hard drive is a good idea although personally I just burn anything useful to a CD/DVD whenever convenient, but I'm slack and cheap ;-)
Umart are pretty good and give a good discount if ordering over the net (don't go for the courier delivery though, their chosen couriers in the Valley can be a little slack, dunno about elsewhere..)
All's not lost though - there are tools out there that can recover "dead" media surprisingly well, you just need a little patience and/or knowhow - we've recovered drives at work with severe drive head crashes (think along the lines of taking a small screwdriver to a CD..) and overheating drives - put it in a plastic bag, pop it in the fridge overnight, reconnect, voila!. Folks like law enforcement have even recovered data from drives that have been shot, so anything's possible.
Michael.
At April 13, 2006 12:50 AM, Anonymous said…
Definately go it!
I rate Umart = tehAwesome!
There's a store right down the road from me (www.pcshopper.com.au).
You can save quite a bit by purchasing an external firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure and a separate HDD / DVD-RW.
(ie, put it together yourself, not pre-made).
For my Powerbook I've got a generic Firewire800/USB 2.0 HDD enclosure and an old 80gig drive in it. Works fine!
Catchya after Bluesfest. I'm so pumped I can't sleep... leaving in tminus 6hours!
Dan.
At April 13, 2006 10:33 AM, B Rich said…
Get a Firewire 400 drive, if it's also USB 2.0, so be it. Firewire 800 is nice if you can use it, but it looks like Apple may be abandoning FW.
As far as the DVD burner goes, tey are really cheap nowadays. If you can, though, get a dual layer burner. I know the media is currently more expensive, but you can still use single-layer disks (cheap) until the dualies come down in price.
At April 15, 2006 12:59 PM, Anonymous said…
Even better than an external HD (which if you leave connected 24/7 die in the arse because they never spin down - see dansdata.com if you disbelieve me) is buy some remote backup on someones server - A company a friend works for does it for about $2 a week using something like rsync they dial you up and perform an incremental backup of your system...
Way better alternative - something I need to get running at my place, just realised I have 295Gb of unprotected data!!!
At April 16, 2006 3:12 AM, Mike said…
I bought a 300gig HD and USB2 external enclosure for ~$140US. The Mac is great in that most of your stuff SHOULD be stored in your home directory.
Once every a couple weeks, I just turn on the drive, drag my home folder over, and go to bed. It's super easy and makes restoring a breeze.
You could take it one step further and use some real backup software which would do scheduled backups without you having to worry about anything, though that will cost a little extra.
At April 16, 2006 11:50 AM, Anonymous said…
launched my site finally, check it out and let me know what you think! theres also a new forum.. you should join! & of course your linked ;)
At April 16, 2006 11:50 AM, Anonymous said…
sinfulishus.com ..opps!
At April 17, 2006 2:08 AM, Strongblade! said…
I just anted to mentioned that, what Mike said above is correct. Virtually everything you would need to back up on the Mac will be inside the Users folder. (Or even just the Home Directory inside the Users folder if you are the only user.)
Everything on the Desktop is also backed up in the Home directory as well.
In the Main Library folder, you might have custom fonts installed or somesuch, but you can have them stored in the Home directory library instead and they will get backed up as well.
Your best bet for backing things up, if you have alot of data, is going the External Hard drive route. You can add stuff after the fact or make multiple backups (Once a week or whatever). A DVD burner, while nice, means buying media and in the case of DVD-R media, write only once. In a year you'll have a pile of burnt discs that may not have much use for back up.
You could use DVD-RW, but a limitiation with that is 4.38 GB of data per disc, so if you have alot of data to back up, it will take several discs and is a pain to split into groups to maximize the backup process.
At May 10, 2006 3:20 PM, Anonymous said…
I haven't toasted a hard drive on OS X yet, but I am usually run MacJanitor and Disk Utility on my volumes.
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