I started up TweetDeck this morning to find that Mitch Haile (@bwahacker), Dennis Klein (@klein2), and Stefan Didak (@stefandidak), three hard-core home-office builders, were deep in a discussion of backups. To provide a little back story, there’s some dispute as to whether Mitch or Stefan has the most famous home office on the web. Dennis probably has the office with the highest frequency of … [Read more...]
Adventures in Data Recovery
A couple of years ago, an associate of the Ur-Guru’s in Europe bought a 1 Tb Buffalo DriveStation Duo to back up his business data. Last week it stopped working. “I've been using it in a RAID 1 array for the past two years, and it's just failed,” he wrote. “Three different Windows PCs here see it as unallocated space.” Bad news. And while Buffalo offered to replace the hardware, since the … [Read more...]
Lessons from the Demise of Journalspace
If you’ve never heard of journalspace, don’t feel bad—I hadn’t either until it popped up in my Google Alerts for “Backup.” My ignorance notwithstanding, the blog hosting company had been around for 6 years and had 14,000 visitors each month. Now all those blogs have vanished, with the bloggers left struggling to retrieve their posts from the Google cache if they didn’t have backups of their … [Read more...]
Quadruple the Backup from Buffalo
Back in 2007, my BFF Jay Pechek sent me a bunch of Maxtor drives. Maxtor’s external hard drives are supposed to have a 5-year warranty, but there’s a little trick with this Free Stuff I get from PR people. When you don’t actually buy something, and don’t have a receipt, you can’t make use of the warranty in the ordinary way. Jay said “I’m your warranty; if anything goes wrong, call me.” Okay, … [Read more...]
Note to Buffalo: Hire a Proofreader
A client of the Ur-Guru's just bought a Buffalo DriveStation Duo USB drive. Kudos to him for taking care of backups, but when he installed the software, he found something a bit less than reassuring in the dialog boxes: In case you didn't catch it (I didn't, the first time), the RAID setup utility is asking the user to restart WiDNows instead of WiNDows. This is doubtless a typo, and while it … [Read more...]
Loading ...