Lost my world – Nearly

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Hi everyone

Heard funny clicking noise under computer desk the other day and ignored it. 2 days later wondered “what is that” and delved under, it was the USB hard drive, thought I will re-boot the whole system including drive that will sort it, BIG mistake !Drive refused to come online, then the reality started to hit, this drive has all my Photos, music collection and video on, and don’t talk to me about backup !

Much messing about then ensued, this included buying another drive, that was the easy bit, then set about taking the caddy apart. Once in it it revealed an IDE drive, trying to mix these with my SATA boot drive on my Dell never did work well, so resurrect an old PC I did. Fire it up with drive as slave and nothing, heart sinks further. Pick the drive up, no it was not mounted “correctly” just hanging out the side of the PC, and bamm hard reboot with no warning, but then on re-start the drive came to life WOW. Start copying FAST, and off to work I go. On return 50% had copied, then stop, and drive did not exist again, a whole evening of putting the drive at certain angles, and knocking it over whilst it was copying once dohh, I managed to get everything off, next port of call for that drive sledge hammer !

So this has to be a warning, so set about housekeeping and backup.

Housekeeping – Best solution here I found was DupKiller – http://www.dupkiller.net/index_en.html did a cracking of finding the hidden duplicate files for me, must have deleted over 60GB worth of files if not more ! and it works will under Vista.

Then to the “backup” – Tried loads of solutions here including the one built into Vista Ultimate, they all seem to want to compress things, which just eats time on jpg and avi files with little gain, the windows one just says “video files, “picture files” ….. and grabs everything from the requested drive, and I did get one that used ntbackup which created one file with everything in but gave me no restore option : (

Then I found AlwaysSync http://allwaysync.com/ does not initially label itself as “backup” software, cos its not its more ! It keeps folders in sync, that includes changes, additions and deletions. It can do this Real time and in both directions, little scary, but I quickly set up one way copy, and some scheduled tasks to update the backups and Left it to it.

Just checked a folder that I knew there were changes in, and they were in sync, and the NT scheduler and the jobs had indeed run successfully, so I am all sorted, which makes me feel MUCH better ! and this works well under vista also.

Going forward I still like the idea of the Maxtor Shared Storage II unit :

http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/MSS_II_Dual/

Currently 299 notes in maplin http://tinyurl.com/3bq2yn

Seems to do everything, 1TB configured as 500GB Raid 1 (mirrored), a UpNP server, iTunes server, print server and Network attached (10/100/1000 Ethernet). Then I could use this on a “day to day basis” and just use it, then use Always Sync to back that up say once a month onto a USB drive, and keep that off site. Sounds like a plan to me !

Just need to save some pennies now.

Off now

Tim

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