ALWAYS BACKUP!

[Slackmaster2K]

Duh.

Yeah you all know I'm a computer geek. And therefore you probably would assume that I always backup & make emergency recover disks and whatnot.

Heh.

Picked up a new hard drive today and decided to install Windows 2000.

The good news? Windows 2000 was a breeze to setup compared to NT4.

The bad news? I lost everything on my old hard drive.

At first I really really wanted to blame Win2K on the loss....but there were a few iffy things that happened during the entire process...bumping here....margaritas there....so it's probably my own damn fault.

Regardless, no I don't have a backup... except *maybe* for a few zip disks from the last time I reinstalled windows. We'll see. And the website that I've put several months into for a local company was uploaded to the ISP for review...thank god otherwise I'd be up 24/7 for the next two weeks.

I'm too tired & out of it to even swear. fudge. hmm...

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Dingo]

SHIT!

My condolences. Good luck getting everything back together again. I hope it doesn't screw things TOO much.

Look on the bright side, though... You're lucky you didn't spill champagne on your computer, or before you knew it IT would be composing the music, taking control of your life and stealing your girlfriend...

Oh, that's right, that was just a movie.

I once reformatted my primary disk partition, carefully copying everything I needed copies of to another partition first. After I'd formatted the partition I discovered I'd only copied the files' short file names, not their long file names. I was amazed (not really) how many things broke when files only had their short file names!

--Dingo

 

[gaffa]

And the 11th commandment was...

THOU SHALT MAKE BACKUPS...

...God said as Moses dropped the tablet the first five commandments were written on...

- gaffa

 

[Emeric]

I feel your pain. I wiped out a few months work being careless when setting up a dual boot... Forunately it was only a few months.

 

[Brian Ferrell]

newbie question here. Can you use floppy disks to back-up your stuff or do you need a zip drive? I guess you could use cd-rw, but I imagine this is more time consuming.

Brian F.

 

[gibs]

I would think cd rw would be the best and most simple way to back up...gibs

 

[sonusman]

backup for what? A .txt file? Yeah, a floopy will work fine, although I can't count how many of them have gone bad on me.

A Zip drive is okay (I have one that I use for storing often changed Word documents that I have) but the best money is a CDR burner. If you are backing up .wav files, it is a must. A floopy will hold exactly 6 seconds of a stereo .wav file at 16 bit 44.1 sampling rate. Not a lot of time...

A Zip will hold about 10 minutes, or what, three songs of the same.

A CDR will hold 74 minutes. Yeah yeah, you can't rewrite to it, and it takes up to 15 mins to right the disk is the full capacity is used, but, for only $1 a disk, and it comparitively hugh capacity, it is worth it. My last client who I mixed, 9 songs, all recorded at 24 bit 48k sampling rate is the proud owner of about 10 disks full of raw, pre-mastered mixes on CDR. They can take those mixes just about anywhere for mastering (but I did that too... ). As long as they take reasonably good care of the disks, they have all the original mixes backed up for a long time to come, and if they ever want to edit, re-master, etc...they mixes are preserved in an easy to use medium supported by any computer with a CD Rom drive. Cool.

Ed

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Welp guys I lost it all. 99.5% of my music woooosh down the toilet.

On the bright side, I stuck Windows 2000 on two of my home machines and it was one of the easiest installations ever!

Even my AMD K6-2 system worked like a charm!
But then I bent half of my right index fingernail off when I was sticking the case back on a machine. That was gross.

Ah well, I never really took much time recording my stuff...now that I have to do it all over again, maybe I'll try harder. Or maybe not.

Next time I'm definately going to buy 10,000 floppies to backup to! Just kiddin Brian. Ed's right, CDR is a great solution. Though besides little 100MB Zip disks, you can also get a Jazz drive which takes 1GB disks....and I think the Orb takes 2GB? If you get some sort of removable hard drive shit, get it INTERNAL and stay away from Syquest. For the love of god stay away FROM SYQUEST.

One of the bad things about CDR is that they scrach EASILY. CDRW is a great idea but usually doesn't work out unless your burner and readers are all top notch.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Layth]

We use the new Jazz 2 gig for the animation biz here, but we've had problems with the internal versions. If you go with the Iomega Jazz stick with the external version it seems pretty reliable. Its fast too, writing and reading but its expensive.

Layth

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Good tip on the internal version. That's a real shame. Parallel port drives are so FRICKING slow. Do they make USB Jazz drives by chance? I've never really looked into them before...

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Dingo]

99.5% of your music down the toilet and you can see a bright side? Man you're philosophical!

These days I'd definitely recommend CD-R as a versatile solution for backups. Sure, CD's can scratch, but a backup should be left safely in its case and never touched until needed.

And any home recordist should have a CD-R anyway, to burn audio CDs.

I contemplated getting a zip or a jazz drive at one point, but couldn't really see any point seeing as I already have a CD-R, and blank CDs are so cheap (frequently free with rebates).

Also, consider seriously the use of off-site backup for important stuff. You'd be really pissed if your backups melted along with your computer when your house burnt down!

Typically, your computer data is worth far more in real terms than your hardware, but I doubt you could put a price on it for insurance.

--Dingo

 

[KingNothing]

Hey Slack -

How much did Win2K run ya? Ive been thinkin about pickin it up, what do u think of it so far? Ive heard that it takes 128 megs of RAM to run that sucker. Would that slow down my computer immensly because currently I only have 128 megs? Thanks.

 

[sonusman]

Hey Slack, here is an email responce about Jaz drives from a buddy of mine...

"I am using SCSI for my jazz-drive, but you can use the $50
adapter called the 'Jazz Traveller' by Iomega which allows
a parallel port connection to be made once the proper drivers are
installed. ( This was the only time I EVER crashed my NT system
& got the 'blue-screen-of-death' however so....) There is also
a new parallel-to-Usb adapter on the market which will allow any
parallel device to operate on the universal-bus. So short of buying
a new 2-gig super Usb-jazz-drive (yes, they do make them now..)
I suppose you could get those two adapters and make a standard
Jazz drive work on the U-bus."

-BSC

He is pretty up on this storage crap because he works with a hugh graphics company...

Anyway, just thought I would share that.

Ed

 

[Brian Ferrell]

We've come a long way since the mid-80's when my band and I recorded 2 songs in a 16 track reel to reel studio and the owner wanted us to buy the 1 inch wide master reel for $40.00. We didn't want to pay it and he ended up recording over our stuff with other bands so we could never use it again to mix down from or rerecord. We'd have gladly paid $1.00 for a master disk.

Brian F.

 

[dmcsilva]

I have a couple of your mp3's on my HD; if you'd like 'em back, I can email them to you.

dmc

 

[Eddie N]

im surprised no one mentioned dvd-ram.. i dont know much of the specifics , but a dvd-ram can hold like 5 gigs or something , and is rewritable.. it runs about 300 bucks ..check pricewatch.com .. cd-rw is still the back up medium of choice , but dvd-ram deserves an honorable mention , since the industry is teetering torwards dvd's..

- eddie -

 

[Dingo]

Good point. What does the media cost?

--Dingo

 

[gaffa]

If you are really serious about backing up - get a tape drive. Scheduled backups, decent backup software that actually backs up the selected protions of your system, OS backups, data only backups, and it is designed to run every night, rotating tapes etc.

The other options are really only for occasional backups, cos either you manually have to organise them (ie. press the go button), or the media doesn't hold enough for a serious backup. Tape drives come is sies from 80Mb (really old travan drives) to 24Gb.

- gaffa

 

[Fishmed]

I just got a DVD RAM for my backups. It can store up to 5 GB of data (2.5 GB per side). I have not had it long enough to tell you the reliability/volatility of the unit. The media is cheap $20 - $40 per disk, depending on which manufacture makes the disk and what retailer you buy it from.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Kingnothing -

Windows 2000 is gonna run you around $150 OEM for the full version. $250 retail.

I like it enough. It's not the memory hog everyone raves it up to be. You have to realize that most of the things you hear about Microsoft are from anti-microsoft fanatics. I'm running it on 128MB just fine. My girlfriend's running it on 96MB on a crappy AMD K6-2 system and it's running very well. For a while I had it on two machines at work here that only had 64MB and it ran great. When I approached the users about upgrading to 128MB they said "how come?" 'Course they're not power users. I stuck 128MB in em just to be safe.

The only hardships have been related to graphics & sound in games and such. When games do run, they run wonderfully...when they don't run, they really don't run But, like any new operating system, we'll have to wait for support from the 3rd party software guys.

Oh, I also have a scanner that doesn't work in 2000...you definately want to find out what's going to work and what's not going to work. Other than that Win2K had drivers for all of the hardware in two machines except for one lowly 56k modem. BUT, it provides generic 56k v.90 drivers...and that stupid modem now works BETTER than it did in 98 with drivers from the manufacturer. Go figure.

dmcsilva -

Thanks man. I think that I already have MP3 versions of my tunes though. I'm going to miss those original tracks.

Slackmaster 2000