Drowning in Drives

I want to start this week’s Backup Reminder with a story about how spam blockers can sometimes backfire. It turns out that Jay Pechek at Seagate actually responded to the first message I sent him about the unexpected and untimely demise of Teras, the Maxtor Shared Storage II drive he had sent me last August.

The problem was, I had recently turned on a challenge/response system for my sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com e-mail account. (That funny way of writing my e-mail address is to foil the harvester bots.) Unless you’re already on my “whitelist” of e-mail addresses to accept, the first time you send a message to that address, you get a “challenge” message generated by my mail server, which asks you to reply in order to confirm that you’re a real person and not a spam-bot. (You’ve probably seen the more sophisticated versions of this system used by Earthlink and Spam Arrest.) All you need to do is hit “reply,” and then “send,” and your original message will reach me.

Unless my “challenge” message gets caught in your spam filter, that is. Then you never realize that there’s something else you have to do in order to get your message through, and I never know you tried to contact me.

Which is exactly what happened with Jay’s response to my “Help!” e-mail. The spam filters at Seagate sucked in my “challenge” message, so I never got his response.

Last week, puzzled by the silence and frustrated by my interactions with the baffled tech support team, I manually added Jay Pecheck’s e-mail address to my whitelist. No sooner had the Backup Reminder gone out than I had a message saying “Didn’t you get my earlier mail?”

So I owe Jay, and Seagate, a public apology, because they weren’t ignoring me.

Not only that, but these people know how to make good when there’s a problem. First, Jay sent me a replacement Maxtor Shared Storage II drive by next-day courier and gave me the UPS account number in order to send back the dead drive so he could see whether the data might be intact in one of the drives in the RAID setup. Then he decided to throw in two more drives: a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus (500 GB) and a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160 GB). Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear, as you can see from the photo.

The first priority was setting up the new Shared Storage II, which I named “Teratides” (4 syllables) because that’s the Homeric Greek for “Son of Teras.” (You already knew I was a geek, but what you might not have realized is that I’m a classics geek.)

As I said last year, basic setup of this drive is quite simple, though there are a few tricks to remember. When you first connect the drive, you’re prompted to ceate a password for the advanced web administration access, but not told that the login is “admin.” And when you first create a “share” from one of the machines on the network, Maxtor Easy Manage suggests your Windows login as the name for the share. The problem with this is that my Windows login is my full name, with a space in it, and login names with spaces don’t work for Easy Manage. I’d remembered that from last time and used my computer name instead.

There were a few other quirks we ran into during the course of setting up Teratides and then connecting Mama Bear to the USB port to act as a backup for the network drive, but we got them sorted out with Jay’s help. For those of you who might be considering getting one of these drives, I’ll sum the fixes up by saying that 1) it’s a good idea to download and install the firmware upgrade, and 2) when you connect a printer to the MSS-II, don’t use the printer software that came with the printer, or it will get confused. I was getting “Communication error” messages from Epson even when documents printed properly, until Jay pointed me at the knowledge base pages that explained how to do the printer setup. (This required uninstalling all the Epson printer software, which in turn required several passes through add/remove programs, both before and after disconnecting the printer.)

Communication with the printer is still a bit slow–there’s a perceptible pause between the time I send the “print” command and the time the printer actually starts working. But the documents all print just fine, and now my housemate can use my printer even when I’m not home and have taken my laptop elsewhere. (Yes, she has her own printer, but mine does 13″-wide documents.)

A few of the issues I ran into almost certainly stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t removed the old Maxtor Easy Manage software before adding the new drive. Easy Manage has been somewhat updated since then, in order to make it play better with the Maxtor Manager software that comes with the OneTouch drives. That’s all been straightened out, and the scheduled backups to Teratides are running properly, as are the backups from Teratides onto Mama Bear.

Those are a little trickier to track, as the interface is a bit lacking, but it’s possible to see that drive by going to “My Network Places,” where it shows up with a long Unix tag: “MaxBackup_Maxt_1_2HAA0GP3.” The backups themselves are .tar.gz files (that’s a compressed Unix format), unlike the files on the Shared Storage drive, which are direct copies mapped into the same folder tree as on my C drive. If this sounds a bit obscure and confusing, it’s deliberate. You’re not supposed to mess with those backup files, because they won’t do you any good if you accidentally delete them.

When we went to bed on Saturday night after setting up the new drives, we noticed that the (very bright) white LED on the front of Mama Bear was gently pulsing in a sleep rhythm. The Ur-Guru loves LEDs (they remind him of home), but I may turn it off after he goes home. To do that, I have to disconnect the OneTouch Plus from Teratides, connect it to my laptop, use the Seagate software to turn off the lights, and then reconnect it to Teratides, so I might just decide not to bother. I’m starting to get used to it, and at least it’s not yellow.

So that’s the news for this week. Seagate is in fact both paying attention and concerned about its reputation—and my data, too, for that matter. I’ll be back next week with a discussion of the new Safety Drill software that comes with the OneTouch drives, and I’ll keep you posted on whether Jay manages to recover the data from the late Teras.