Sounds You Never Want to Hear: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-21-07

Long-time readers will remember that it was just over a year ago that Seagate kindly sent me a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive, which I gleefully installed and which has been performing faithfully ever since. Just a few days ago I had set it up as a print server, seeing no need to have a separate print server when this would work as well.

Unfortunately, my printer (an Epson Stylus Photo 1280, not in the first flush of its youth) doesn't really seem to like print servers. I had no end of trouble with the stand-alone Netgear print server, and yesterday I started having trouble using it through the network drive. So I started messing about with the settings on Teras (that's the drive, named for its 1 TB capacity) to see whether I could reinstall or otherwise sort out the printer.

Unfortunately, I had somehow mislaid the main administrative password for the drive. I have no idea how I managed to do this, since I store almost all my passwords in Password Prompter, and the only passwords I don't write down are the familiar ones I use all the time.

Fortunately, it's possible to reset the administrative password on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive without affecting the data or even the other user information. It does require renaming the drive and setting a new password, which I did without trouble. (And this time I put it right into Password Prompter.)

When I'd finished doing that, the Ur-Guru went back to copying photos he'd shot that morning into the Public folder on Teras. I was examining the advanced settings to see whether I could find anything that would help me with the printer when Stefan asked "Did you just do something?"

No, actually, I hadn't. But the power light on the network drive had gone from green to amber (something I'd only seen during the reset) and the light indicating drive activity had gone off. The administrative interface stopped responding. Neither the power button nor the reset button produced any response.

I tried looking up the significance of the amber light in the Maxtor knowledge base, but nothing I found was very helpful, as they all referred to specific series of flashes, whereas this light was fluttering like a bad case of heart palpitations.

After a while, unwillingly, I pulled out the power cable. We dusted off the drive, reconnected it, and tried again. It appeared to go through a normal powering-up sequence, but there were some odd clicking noises.

"Is that normal?" Stefan asked.

"I've never heard it before," I responded, "And I don't like it."

I liked it a lot less when it devolved into a rhythmic rocking sound. Tock, tock. Tock, tock. The Ur-Guru explains that this is the sound of the head trying to read data across the disk and then returning (tock!) to the "park" position.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, very bad. Listen for yourself.

It was at this point that we realized that the RAID-1 option on the drive isn't all that helpful, as there's no way to tell the Maxtor Shared Storage II to use the other disk. Unlike traditional RAID boxes, the drives in the MSS-II are sealed into a single container—one I'm not about to try opening. So my data may be intact, but I'm in no position to get at it.

Now, being me, I have other copies of most of what's on that drive. My active business and financial data, not to mention my Outlook PST file, gets backed up at least once a day to other places, notably the new FreeAgent Go drive and the second internal drive. (Some of the client data also gets backed up online via Mozy.) I have most of the older client data on DVDs that I make at the end of the year. At least some of the software install packages exist on their original CDs, and some of the rest is freeware I can download again. Much of it, indeed, was probably obsolete; I download a lot of things in order to test them. The stuff I use most is also on the F drive.

If I've learned anything in four years of writing this Backup Reminder, it's that one copy does not make a backup. So I don't think I've lost anything irreplaceable.

But I'm two weeks past the drive's measly one-year warranty period. And even though I didn't have to pay for it in the first place, I'll almost certainly have to pay to replace it. And while the price has come down considerably since the drive was introduced last year, I'm not at all sure that I want to turn that into an annual investment.

The main reason I went with Seagate's FreeAgent Go instead of the Western Digital Passport was the 5-year warranty on the Seagate drive. Given what just happened with my Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, I'd hesitate to get a replacement NAS drive—from any manufacturer—without a longer warranty.

The moral of the story: just because you have a large drive that can serve as catch-all backup and storage for every machine in your house doesn't mean you don't have to keep additional copies of your data. Any drive can fail, and every drive eventually will. If it's important to you, make sure you keep it in more than one place.

Next Friday I will be at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, so it's a good bet that the backup reminder will focus on something related to backing up audio and video files--or perhaps to making backups while traveling. (It will be the first time my FreeAgent Go drive goes someplace with me.)

Meanwhile, I'm really hoping to hear something from Seagate.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor Shared Storage II, Seagate

Testing the GParted Live CD: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-14-07

Last week I mentioned that I'd seen an intriguing post on Lifehacker entitled "Copy and Paste your Entire Hard Drive with Two Clicks with GParted." This sounded rather improbable to me, but I wanted to check it out.

There was a small problem with doing so, because the link on the Lifehacker site is broken, but I figured out how to fix it and was able to go over to Sourceforge to download the GParted Live CD .iso file. ("GParted" stands for "Gnome Partition Editor," but that's not of particular interest to the non-geek, and in particular the non-Linux geek.)

At first it seemed a bit strange to be using a Linux tool to back up a Windows drive, though at second thought it actually makes sense. I automatically distrust anything that tries to back up the Windows operating system from within Windows, because the system state keeps changing. I normally make drive images using Ghost 8 after booting my machine from the non-Windows Bart-PE CD. (PE stands for Pre-Environment, another thing you probably don't want to know about. Bart is just the guy who assembled this useful CD.)

Assembling the Bart-PE CD was beyond me; the Ur-Guru made mine. But the GParted Live CD is ready to burn: just start up your CD-burning software, open the .iso file, and burn. Presto: a bootable CD.

So I shut down my computer and booted from the CD, and after selecting the appropriate language/keyboard layout, I was in GParted and it was showing me the partitions on my C drive. Not that it actually said "C drive," mind you. It said "dev/hda1". "Dev" stands for "device," and there's a menu at the top where you get to choose devices. My choices were hda1 (my C drive), hda2 (my D drive), and sda1 (the FreeAgent Go drive). My Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was conspicuous by its absence.

That was the first problem, because if you copy a partition with GParted, you have to copy the whole thing, and it doesn't get compressed. I don't have 80 GB free on either the D drive or the F drive. So there was no place to put the drive if I copied it.

And even if I'd been able to see the network drive (which has about 200 GB free at the moment), copying and pasting with GParted doesn't just fill in empty space, but reformats the whole drive, thus wiping out anything on there. (It does give you a big warning prompt to prevent you from doing so.)

So yesterday I pulled out my not-yet-recycled X drive, which was completely empty and is an 80 GB drive like my C drive, hooked it up to the USB port, and rebooted with the PArted Live CD. I was then able to select the partition representing the C drive (hda1), hit the "copy" button, select the partition representing the X drive (sda2), hit the "paste" button, and apply the operation.

I was a little surprised that I had to do something more than hit the "paste" button to start the drive copy, though when you're partitioning drives and potentially removing all the data on them, it's not a bad idea to have to take an extra step or two. But even without that, it's definitely more than two clicks, because you have to navigate between partitions.

Still, once you get past the unfamiliar-to-Windows-users (and probably even less familiar to Mac users) interface, it is a straightforward procedure. I hit the "apply" button and off it went.

Copying 80 GB is not a speedy activity even over USB 2.0 hi-speed, but I was about to leave for a client appointment anyway. I started the copying around 9 or 9:30 AM, and when I got home at about 1:30 PM it was finished. I exited GParted, selected "eject and reboot" from the shut down menu, and took a look at the X drive in Windows Explorer.

It was all there: everything on the C drive, including the label "local disk." I'm presuming I could boot from the X drive, now, as long as I set the BIOS on my machine to look for a USB device before checking the local hard drive. And I could use GParted again to copy the partition onto a new machine—though it would have to have identical hardware for me to be confident that there wouldn't be weird issues with drivers for things like sound and graphics cards that would mess it up.

I'm not likely to start using GParted instead of Ghost, if only because I can do the Ghost backups onto my network drive and keep several of them there. But it's free and it requires only a moderate degree of geekiness to use. It also handles just about any conceivable file system, so you should be able to use it on Macs as well as PCs and Linux boxes. And restoring files from the GParted backup doesn't require any proprietary software. (That's the good news and the bad news, as there's no way to encrypt the files and anyone could take that drive and have access to everything in my machine.)

Two clicks is definitely an exaggeration, though. Perhaps I should talk to Lifehacker about truth in advertising.

Technorati Tags: GParted Live CD, Lifehacker

Get a Backup Blidget

I’ve just discovered a new tool from Widgetbox: blog widgets, or “blidgets.” You can take any RSS feed and turn it into a widget that other people can include in their blogs or on any other web page. I created one for this blog, so you can have the latest news in data backup on your own website.

Hop on over to the Backup Blidget page to copy and paste the Java or Flash version into your HTML, or automatically install it in TypePad, PageFlakes, Facebook—or Blogger, for that matter.

The Shortest Post Since 2003: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-07-07

It's 4:20 PM and I've had some very long days this week, with more to follow next week. Somewhere in there I did manage to make a Ghost backup of my system, the first in a long time. (It's getting time—and past time—to do a hygienic reinstall of Enna, though I don't know whether I'll manage it before the Ur-Guru arrives next weekend.) Meanwhile, my five automated file backup systems continue to run smoothly.

I saw an enticing headline on Lifehacker yesterday: "Copy and Paste your Entire Hard Drive with Two Clicks with GParted." That just sounded too good to be true. I haven't had time to find out whether it is yet (I'm downloading the ISO of the GParted Live CD right now), but I discovered that there's actually a substantial collection of backup-related articles on Lifehacker. The Mac readers on this list may find them particularly helpful, as there are several reviews of Mac software from real Mac users, which I'm not.

You can see the whole collection on the Lifehacker Blog. Write in and tell me whether any of the tips are helpful to you, and I'll check GParted out for next week.

Technorati Tags: Lifehacker, backup, GParted Live CD, Norton Ghost