Re: Photography bloopers.

That is probably a good idea. We did that where I was working for about nine
years, and we had two servers with a huge database on mirrored drives. One
was a production server and the other a dev/backup server each containing
four drives and both pairs mirrored.

On Friday, at exactly quitting time, we had a voltage drop, and the
computers that were expensive in the extreme, all had one defect, they all
had a missing zenor diode that was supposed to be in the power regulation
circuitry. With the diode in, a voltage drop would be compensated by drawing
power from capacitors to keep the voltage up. Without the diodes, the
voltage dropped, and the amperage draw skyrocketed and every circuit in both
servers let the magic smoke out.

Fortunately, I had set up hourly differential backups. We only had to
restore the nightly backup and the most recent. Unfortunately, it took us
all weekend to set up the servers and get everything working on a quirky
slow as molasses IDE without raid system and get the accounts in because the
NT account info was lost, and all email was lost. Yep, ... they were using
the database servers for email and PDC. ... ouch!
"Trey" <treydog90spam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:QCXAe.22107$aA5.2658@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "grolschie" <grolschie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:VgWAe.76$PL5.39707@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>> "Garry Freemyer" <garryfre@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:d7SAe.822$Rv7.681@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>>> Below this is another photography story but first my story of untimely
>>> drive deaths. I had my computer die like this suddenly about 12 years
>>> ago, but I had backups of most everything. Unfortunately, at the same
>>> time a memory chip on the motherboard in the floppy drive controller
>>> circuitry died and the result was a change in the behavior of the drive.
>>> When I would insert a disk, the drive would over-write every other byte
>>> on the floppy with 255 in about 3 to four seconds and report "No files
>>> on drive A:" even if the disk was write protected. The result was I
>>> ended up destroying every file, program, picture, and everything I had
>>> backed up and on original disks. Everything I had done in about 12 years
>>> was irretrievably lost.
>>
>> I hate that. In the days before CD writers were affordable I was halfway
>> through a B.Sc in Comp Sci. I was about to format the C drive on my home
>> pc for it's 6 monthly reinstall of Windows. Had everything backed up on a
>> separate hard disk. My wifes uncle, an IT guy from Holland came to visit
>> and was telling me I should format Fat32 partitions using /u flag so that
>> it cannot be simply unformatted. "Ok", I say, "you do it then". He typed
>> "format D: /u" and we both watched years worth of source code (some 3D
>> networked games and screensavers I was working on), scanned wedding
>> photographs and precious MS Office documents go bye byes. He formatted
>> the wrong drive. The very second he hit the enter key to confirm the
>> format, he knew the mistake he had made. He looked at me and asked me if
>> there was anything important on them. I swallowed hard and said "no,
>> don't worry about it" because it was bad enough that one of us was
>> already devastated, without making him feel terrible also. Needless to
>> say, I never re-wrote any of the code again - too big a job.
>>
>> grol
>>
> I work in computer support all day, I have seen far too many hard drived
> die in my years of techie work... I understand the value of data, and its
> value is FAR less then a stupid hard drive. this is why I built my new
> machine with a mirrored hard drive. One dies, I still ahve the other until
> I get the dead one replaced.
> This does not protect me against 'user error' I have another computer, an
> old P3 600 Gateway that I have Windows 2000 on, Also, with mirrored hard
> drives. this machine is turned on about once a month for me to dump any
> files that have changed in the past month, then its off again. Call it
> overkill if you want. but honestly, how much are your kid's childhood
> photos worth? For me, they are worth far more then some old computer
> someone gave me, two hard drives and a raid card.
> Thats one MAJOR reason I refuse to work on personal machines, I hate to
> say "Its gone buddy, its alllll gone"
>
>


.

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