Sunday, August 17, 2008

Complete Computer Chaos...


...just got home and am now dealing with catastrophic failure on my main computer...dead as a freakin' brick...well, doesn't that just suck?

Things will be a little quiet while I sort this wreckage out.

I'm also going to take a break from the podcast this week as well because
1) I have exactly one day at home and at least two days of salvage work.
2) I'm not sure if any of my recording studio joined the computer in a suicide pack, and to tell you the truth I just don't ave the heart to face it tonight
I'll be back up full speed in a week as soon as I've finished pissing away several thousand dollars I don't presently have.

I know...I know...be optimistic...maybe it's just a fried power supply...maybe the date is recoverable...maybe it'll be such an easy repair Apple will do it for free...

Yeah, I lost a lot of work...strangely enough, I had a bad karma feeling, so the last thing I did before I left town last week was order a new hard drive so I could do a complete cloning of my main system. I got home yesterday, unwrapped the drive and made a note on the old To-Do list to clone my main drive on Monday morning.

That would come under the heading of "Day Late & Dollar Short!"

Sorry for this...my fault totally...

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somebody's messing with your CHI, Sorry dude.

Anonymous said...

Welcome to the club, Michael. I had three systems bite the dust all on the same day two weeks ago.

One dead hard drive in a sever, one dead network card in the backup server (which, alas, had failed to back anything up) and while repairing the main server, the power supply in my computer burned up.

I bought a terabyte, external drive for $180. I'm not losing anything, ever again!

Anonymous said...

Make sure you have a real good online UPS (check out APC brand, not the low end crap for students etc).

Then think seriously about moving your data onto Network Attached Storage (check out Netapp brand, low end here is fine).

The Mean Time Between Failure on an individual disk is not long enough for business data. You have to go to RAID type devices. It will cost you a pretty penny but quality always costs. If you go for the 1TB $180 dollar type drives you will just lose a tremendous amount of data all at once at sometime in the future.

Eric said...

You need to mirror your storage, either RAID 1 or external storage as nj_larry advised.

A good UPS (APC) and regular backups are also a must.

Jerry The Geek said...

Apple Ka-Boom! (?)

Everything everyone has said here is Good Advice. Expensive, yes; but not as expensive as losing your 'stuff'. Fortunately, you're already on the road with having a second drive ... I only assume this was an external drive for back-ups.

Fortunately, your Blog is web-based, so we can share your pain.

Schadenfreude is NEVER imposed on The Night The Music Died.

Anonymous said...

Great Blog: Michael--Crashing computers, firearms, tattoos, parrots . . .

I have a smart African grey that could be trained to shoot your hard drive. He doesn't have a tattoo, but I do.

Joan

Anonymous said...

Michael, sorry to hear the bad news. I definitly recommend giving Apple a call before you do anything. GOOD LUCK. We will all be patient while you recover.

Anonymous said...

RAID is the way to go. I have a Mirrored Drive in my Mac, It's level 1 (IIRC), which means it's a clone. It won't help if I throw something away, but I can be up and running after a catastrophic failure.

All it costs is an extra drive. Set it and forget it.

Love the Blog and the Podcast.

Anonymous said...

The other way to go that is outstanding on a Mac is the new Apple Time Machine/Time Capsule. Basically a terabyte hard-drive set up on the WiFi network that has an automatic backup of ALL your computers. That combined with the RAID approach would be my recommendation as a Mac guy since the damn things were invented.

cheers,
BigBadBob

Anonymous said...

I have automatic backup that I have set to run an upload one night a week to an offsite location. It's free with my ISP, Road Runner.
I considered an external hard drive but it's just as vulnerable to fire and theft as the computer itself. Offsite is the way to go.

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Unknown said...

Nice post! Can’t wait for the next one. Keep stuff like this coming.

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