Hard Driving
The hard drive that refused to boot although it could be otherwise read appears to have been actually failing, as opposed to the previous times this no-boot-but-can-read problem showed up. Although I was able to get it running again from the second-level backup clone, the Dell diagnostics announced bad sectors and drive-failure codes. I therefore went to Fry's this past weekend and bought a new drive. (For now, you can still buy IDE drives, thank goodness.) I cloned the failing drive into the blank drive, but I was concerned that this might introduce errors; however, when I ran diagnostics on the new drive, it detected no problems. So I then "retired" the failing drive and installed the new drive as my "flagship." I still have two backup hard drives that I use in rotation, and on top of that there is now a 1TB backup storage device in the office, the price of such things having fallen sufficiently low that I feel I can afford them.
Unfortunately, backups are slow. Last night, I told DriveClone to backup the entire hard drive (including the partition information) to the backup "brick." When I got up about eight hours later, it was reporting that the verification step still had an hour to go, so I had to interrupt it because I needed to get to work. I therefore figure I'll need to allow at least ten hours for a full backup-and-verify.
DriveClone claims that it can restore a complete computer system from one of those backups, which is a little different than the clones. I'm going to test that out today, by restoring the backup job to the older of the two rotating backup hard drives. I can set off the restore job when I leave for the office, and with luck it should be finished by the time I get home; I can then pop that drive into my computer and see if it restored stuff.
I should go through my restored hard drive and archive a bunch of photos and videos, and probably delete some of the video that I'm never going to get around to processing or using. It's much too easy to fill up the drive with such stuff. The problem with archiving is, of course, that you end up with the need for the material you've archived at inopportune times like, say, in the middle of a convention when you obviously don't have access to archive drives located back home.
Unfortunately, backups are slow. Last night, I told DriveClone to backup the entire hard drive (including the partition information) to the backup "brick." When I got up about eight hours later, it was reporting that the verification step still had an hour to go, so I had to interrupt it because I needed to get to work. I therefore figure I'll need to allow at least ten hours for a full backup-and-verify.
DriveClone claims that it can restore a complete computer system from one of those backups, which is a little different than the clones. I'm going to test that out today, by restoring the backup job to the older of the two rotating backup hard drives. I can set off the restore job when I leave for the office, and with luck it should be finished by the time I get home; I can then pop that drive into my computer and see if it restored stuff.
I should go through my restored hard drive and archive a bunch of photos and videos, and probably delete some of the video that I'm never going to get around to processing or using. It's much too easy to fill up the drive with such stuff. The problem with archiving is, of course, that you end up with the need for the material you've archived at inopportune times like, say, in the middle of a convention when you obviously don't have access to archive drives located back home.