Bounce Back

Recently, I had the opportunity to upgrade my web server. Actually, to create a cluster of web servers. To do so, I needed to make a duplicate of my original hard drive to place in the new additional server. I chose partimage ( a linux open source application ) to make my copy of the original.

I had an old usb compactflash card reader and a 16gb compactflash card — enough room for the data on the original hard drive. I started the copying process using partimage. It soon indicated that it would take more than a couple of hours to make the image and was continuing to increase the total hours. I immediately stopped the process and studied the situation.

Why so long??

The device ( card reader ) is a sandisk imagemate sddr-31. It is a usb 1.1 device. A usb 1.1 device has a full speed specification of about 1.2mbytes per second. I believe that if I had left it running until it had completed its summary of estimated time, it would have been well over 24 hours. I am sure that the computer’s cpu speed may have had something to do with it to. It wasn’t the speediest I have — only 500mhz processor in it.

I looked around my computer room and I found an external usb hard drive ( usb version 2.0 ) and hooked that up for the transfer device. It only took 20 minutes to complete the process using this device.

Not only do you need to know YOUR limitations, you need to know that of your equipment as well.

Note: Some months ago, I promised an article on Useful Online tools. Here it is.

Adapted from my own searches and information from the internet.

It’s not the first time. It’s happened before. A hard drive crash — This time the drive is dead. How are you going to piece things back together?

You do backup your system, don’t you?

I have heard stories of well meaning individuals that do back up their system, but never checked the backups and when you really need the back up, it is either missing or corrupted.



Again, the question becomes “how do you piece things back together?”.

What Online tools can you put into place now, that will be useful if/when your hard drive dies.?

Let’s look at a list of useful online tools. These tools are even more useful because in their basic form, they have no cost involved.

1. Backup:
There are several different types of backups.
a. A system backup that attempts to backup everything on your hard drive to a separate drive ( a complete image of your drive). Usually this requires some hefty external hard drive.
b. Partial backups that only capture your data ( documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, music, etc ). Not a total backup but perhaps all of your document, spreadsheets, presentations, etc will fit into an online backup system such as Syncplicity. They allow a 2gb backup of files for no charge. For more advanced usage, it will cost you approximately 10 dollars per month.

If you use a Mac or Linux, syncplicity is not for you. It is a windows only application or service.
An Alternate service ( with expanded storage size — 50gb of space ) that is xp, mac, & linux friendly is adrive.com. It appears ok. it’s upload/download applications work, but I would like to see an easier method of multiple file uploads/downloads. I have have been using it for about 6 months. They have modified their service over the months and it seems to be easier to you. It doesn’t offer syncronization.
1.Another storage option for certain file types ( document files, spreadsheet files, presentation files and pdf files ) can be stored in google docs — a feature of gmail.com
2. (see gmail in#2 )

Link: http://www.syncplicity.com
link: http://www.adrive.com

2. Emails:
All those special notes, informational emails that you received and have been keeping for years on your local computer will be gone if your hard drive is totally dead. Why not switch to a stable online email service where your emails ( received or sent ) are stored on their backed up servers? I recommend gmail. Not only does gmail give you this email storage feature, it has other features called google docs where you can store spreadsheets, document files, presentation files and even pdf files.
Another email service is yahoo.com’s email service. I know some of you now use it, I even have an account on yahoo.com, but don’t use it enough to give any recommendations.

Link: http://gmail.com
Link: http://yahoo.com

3. Those great pictures:
Check out Picasa for you digital picture storage for free. It is available for XP, Mac, & Linux. Picasa normally detects your operating system and will direct you to the proper operating system area for download of it’s application.

Link: http://picasa.google.com

4. Bookmark Servce:
Xmarks ( formerlly foxmarks ) — I do a lot of internet searching for myself & others. By installing the Xmarks add-on to my browser, my bookmarks are all available on my laptop, my home computer & if for some reason, I am on some other computer, I can retrieve any bookmark I have stored with Xmarks. I like that this service offers me the ability to access all of these online, as well as have them at my fingertips any time I need them. The big reason for the bookmark service is if my hard drive dies — I still have all my bookmarks available to be re-installed on a new drive. Can I have a happy face on that??? :-)

http://www.xmarks.com/

5. Passwords:
Your hard drive with all information on your passwords ( usernames & passwords ) is gone. Would there been a way to protect this information. You could use a password manager where all your passwords are stored encrypted at a remote site for you.
I am using keepassX which was originally only for linux, but now has versions for Windows XP and Mac.
Once you have gathered all your username and password information into an encrypted file, you should upload it to some safe location such as adrive.com for backup.

Link: http://www.keepassx.org/

6. Software licenses:
Some of my new software is obtained by downloading and I don’t get a physical copy on CD. If practical, I make a copy of the downloaded software to cd and also store the downloaded installation software in a special folder on my pc that is backed up regularly. It is wise to make a pdf copy of the software license usually sent to you in an email. I store this in my documents area as well. You can use Keepassx program that will store all of your software licenses and purchase information in encrypted form. I personally retain the key and purchase info with my password database using keepassx. If you wish to obtain a separate application, Registration Vault can be used for that. It is only 20 dollars.

Link: http://www.canyonsoftware.com/

7. Contact management:
If you use the suggested email service ( gmail.com ), their contacts ( normally used for email addresses ) is quite useful for contact management. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be much more than a usual contact list, but it has the capability of adding other sections to each contact. Since all of gmail is external to your computer, you don’t stand the chance of losing data if hard drive dies. You can also export your contacts to your computer in case the internet is down when you need a contact telephone number, etc.

gmail also has a calendar for event planning.

If you don’t want gmail or its features, you might want to try Airset. It regularly syncs contacts (with notes) and your calendar to their online service.

Link: http://gmail.com
Link: http://www.airset.com

8. Project management:
Although I don’t really have a lot of use for project management, on line project management might be useful if you are collaborating with others on a project ( such as a mission team at church, visitor contact collaboration, etc ). A fairly simple and free on line project management application is available through zoho.com. I have started using it as a way to keep up with church sound system projects. I had subscribe to planprojects.com to test it as well, but there appears to be a server problem at the moment.

Link: http://projects.zoho.com/jsp/home.jsp
Link: http://www.planprojects.com
(verification email hasn’t shown up. perhaps server down? )

9. Accounting:
If you use accounting software, peachtree, quickbooks, quicken, etc, you probably back up to either a floppy or a usb flash drive. This is something that would be useful to encrypt and upload to your online storage area as well.

10. Alternate Free services:
Some other software applications or services that might be useful are:
fireftp a plug in for firefox that is an ftp client
If you need to keep up with your working hours, you might find myhours.com useful.

11. Encryption:
There are some excellent open source ( free ) software packages for encrypting files. Some are more elaborate than others. In linux, you can individually encrypt or decrypt files using gpg. Both the software programs listed below are available for linux, windows and mac.

TrueCrypt
Link: http://www.truecrypt.org/
Keyparc
Link: http://keyparc.com/web/en/

NOTE: None of the above can be very useful if stored on your hard drive.

I’ve discovered that online services have provided me with the greatest backup to help me through this computer crisis. My lesson? Duplicate as much as you can in online systems. In this way, you’ll have access to your data when you travel, when you have a computer crash, or when you’re faced with a natural disaster.

Even when it appears that the hard drive is toast, there may be some chance to revive it — at least long enough to capture your most important data. I will deal with that issue in a separate article, but for now, let’s assume you were able to get back up and running and want to be pro-active about securing your data in the event of another crash.

Resources:
1.http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/02/11/data-recovery-10-most-effective-computer-backup-tools/
2.All Links listed in the Article
3.http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/tool/FreeTools.html
4.http://netsecurity.about.com/od/disasterrecovery/a/ontrackdata.htm
5.http://netsecurity.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=netsecurity&zu=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.devx.com%2Fenterprise%2Farticles%2Fdrecovery%2FDRPlan%2FDRPlan-1.asp
6.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_recovery
7.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306541

In late 2000, a group of Christians formed a new church in Raleigh, NC. Our numbers grew quickly and soon someone said — “We need a website”. I was given that chore, along with being the “PaMan”. As you have no doubt read in some of my earlier posts, “I am not a young person”.

After nearly 9 years, I am getting away from the web page stuff. By the end of this year, I will have divorced myself of the pa system work as well. Both webwork & pa work have grown as our church has grown.

Recently, I converted a web design by one of our members to be used with Wordpress. Now the new webmaster will be able to direct others to help him keep the webpages up to day, fresh with new information.

Today was the first day that my Website duties have truly gone away.

I am FREE, FREE at Last!

Some time ago, I purchased a shareware program for my windows xp laptop. It was called “Goldwave”. Later, I had a hard drive failure on the laptop and didn”t know where my registration key was for the Goldwave software when I installed it again. I wrote to Goldwave, they researched it and emailed me the key.

Unfortunately, the application has to be re-installed again and the key information is not on any of my running computers.

Pride — I really don’t want to write Goldwave again. By doing so, I am admitting how sloppy my record keeping really is.

Punishment — Either write Goldwave or search all available hard drives ( usb external or hard drives on the shelf ) for any reference to either the key or the email.

It is a slow process.

Perserverance –

I can’t believe I found it!



It was 3 years ago when I asked Goldwave for the registration key. Two years ago, I switched email providers and email client programs. Major renovations in my computer system followed, including the elimination of windows xp on my normal desktop pc.

Backups are wonderful!

Before the last major change to my desktop, I backed up my windows xp drive to an external hard drive – a complete image of that drive! Thank goodness for backups. Burried deep in the image was old email files that were used with a previous email provider.

It really pays to:
1.save all emails ( incoming & outgoing )
2.backup up your drives
3.have secondary backups ( completely external from your location )

Coming soon – 10 plus online tools to save the day.

While I was never a Boy Scout, I was a cub scout. I guess I learned to be prepared while in the Cub Scouts.

Recently, our church had a revival. It started with two sermons on Saturday night, three on Sunday, and one each on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights.

As the “official” sound ( pa system ) person for the church, I was asked to record each sermon for distribution on CD.

Our Sound room is equipped with a tower computer and a firewire connection to a multi-channel mixer. Getting a digitized recording was not a problem. My main concern is some sort of failure whether mechanical, electrical or human might prevent me getting a recording of all the sermons.

I devised a plan.

My main recording would be on the computer. My secondary recording would be on a cassette deck with audio fed from the mixer to the deck and a third recording would be on my Sony digital 8 camcorder with audio fed from the mixer through a special interface that I designed that reduced the mixer level down to microphone level. All equipment, except the camcorder which had it’s own battery, was attached to a small UPS.

The results were:

• Main recording was not hampered. Complete recording of all the sermons
• Tape deck recording was only hampered by the speaker going past the length of the tape, twice.
• Video recording was very good except one where human failure entered and I lost the first couple of minutes of the sermon.

Now to burn about 200 cds of the sermons.

Recently on the family email thread, the discussion of book reading was started. A variety of books were thrown into the emails, ranging from Stephen King to H.G Wells and in between.

My own list was varied. I read my bible each day. Occasionally, I will start on a book. If I get engrossed in it. I may complete the book within a week.

There is one book that I am working on. Can’t get really into, but don’t want to quit reading it. It’s a pulitzer prize winning book, “The making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. It’s rather long and detailed.

I am good for about 10 pages of reading before I put it down. Once I complete it I want to read several books by H.G. Wells, one that is slightly connected with the history of the making of the atomic bomb — “The world set free”.

More on reading books later.

You have heard it said that you should back up your data on you pc. I am here to affirm that. My webserver that brings you this weblog is a prime example of non-backup of the data.

A few days ago, I noticed that none of my websites coming from my webserver were on line. I suspect that the computer had failed to restart after a power failure. I found out differently. I could not start the computer with my present hard drive. It made weird noises and failed to boot.

The first thing I did was reroute my webpages to an external site just to have the front page of each website available on the internet as an emergency display. Next I started to troubleshoot.

Through the use of SPINRITE, I was able to repair the hard drive. I still could not get the hard drive to work in the webserver pc. Final result is that the hard drive controller has gone amuck.

I put the hard drive in another pc and did a direct copy of the hard drive with all applications, configurations, and web data. I also copied all of my webserver data to another pc hard drive and will continue to do so.

One of the major problems with pc’s and hard drives is that unless you save your data in multiple drives, save it on hard copy, you are open to disaster.

Formulate a back up plan and stick with it. One day you will thank me for it.

About five years ago I had an attack of Kidney stones. It wasn’t my first and it probably won’t be my last. At the time, a friend on mine suggested drinking cranberry juice each day. “it will help with your kidney problems”, I was told.

Not long after that, My mother was hospitalized with urinary tract infection and while visiting her, I found that the hospital was giving her cranberry juice. Hmm, might be something to this  cranberry juice.

I began drinking a half a glass of cranberry juice cocktail each morning. Since then, I have had three kidney stone attacks. None of them were painful. Just aggravating. I captured the stones and compare them to my last painful attack. The painful stones were jagged with spikes. The non painful ones were very smooth.

I continued to drink cranberry juice each morning, but was “disturb” to find that a group of researchers did a test that seemed to indicate that cranberry juice didn’t help with kidney stones.
See <a href=”http://www.foodnavigator.com/news/news-ng.asp?n=62124-cranberry-juice-kidney-stones-urinary-tract”>http://www.foodnavigator.com</a>

The last paragraph of the article says “The study does not detract from the scientific evidence supporting cranberry juice’s use for urinary tract health, but it does indicate that it is not an advisable course of action for those with a tendency towards kidney stones.”

As usual, I am the exception. :-)