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One of my hard drives has gone down, and with it for a short time all my email. The latest backup of email is about a month ago. Hopefully I'll be able to recover data from the failing drive. But not tonight. I've had enough!

The drive also contains documents and letters, also last backed up a month ago. I've been trying to remember if there are any important documents - I don't think there are.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Documents and mail data recovered.

The failing hard drive started working normally after a spell in the freezer (they usually do - I don't know why... further from the curie point perhaps?).

I've still got to get back software and settings after another spell in the freezer, but if that fails, it won't matter because I have the data. Either way, email should be working by lunch time.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Email's back up.

I've got some nasty disc space problems because the temporary replacement drive isn't big enough (I thought I was going to make it with a bit of tidying). I've also recovered bits in chunks and have to transfer data back to the right places. At least nothing's lost except about 10 hours.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul

Just a suggestion

Have you considered going for a RAID system? These days hard-drives are at (almost) throw-away prices, and RAID should save you the hassle of having to manually recover stuff.
I realise you're probably cash-strapped, and £65 for a hard drive is still not exactly peanuts, but time is money, after all.

Cheers
Peter

I've run RAID previously, and I believe its best application is in servers or similar where the primary threat is 'down time'. It's OK as a front line backup, but threats like fire, theft and lightning kill the backup as well as the master.

The right 'live backup' solution for my work is cloning important and changable data to a laptop via a LAN. I need the data and the net connections when I'm out of the office too. But I don't have the laptop.

I do have off-site backups of the important Safe Speed stuff including complete copies of the web site and all the documentation, calculations, spreadsheets, email, document history and so on behind it.

I've had three data losses since Christmas 2003, two hard drive failures and some wierd hacking/trojan attack. So far not one single byte has been lost. The two hard drive failures (December 2004 and this weekend) are the only two affecting 'my main machine' in 20 years of hard disc reliance. Previous drives and machines have been replaced or upgraded before failure. I theorise that these two are a likely consequence of having inadequate budgets.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I'm still having 'fun' with this hard drive thing.

The rescue drive that received the recovered data turned out to be dodgy too. My fault - obviously. Because of my previous work as a computer engineer there are many dozens of used hard drives here. Some have been removed in the process of upgrading and some in the process of repair. Generally I know which are which, but the 'good drives' pile has dwindled over the last couple of years. I now have unknown and dead drives. I examined and tested a few unknown drives and found one that seemed good. But it isn't good. It's flaky. To be fair, it isn't very flaky and I fully expect it to work well enough to copy all the data when it's cool (let alone freezered).

I've been scraping around and I've got a known good drive to recover the data to again. What a waste of time

[edited to add - I already have copies of the important mail data and documents on a known good drive, so there isn't going to be data loss from these events, just hassle]

I'll order a couple of new drives in the morning.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

You may already know this, Paul, but I was with a bloke toady who has a "pen drive" - had it a month or so now - USB2 - 1G sub £60.

I was - and am - truly amazed. So space-efficient too.

I spent most of saturday copying data onto brand new drives. It's amazing how long it takes, especially when you're rationalising and organising at the same time. Over 14 hours in fact.

I'm much better protected against hard drive failure already, but I still have more work to do on improved front line historical backups.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Yeah, they are amazing. I've got a 250MB one, but even the largest aren't much use for backing up my present work. I'm carrying 3GB of mail history for example. That said, I'm about to find our what it zips to and I bet it's very highly compressible.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety