Looks like I fried my computer -- Note back up often!
 

OMG I've had a nightmare couple of days. Looks like my piece of SHIT APC surge protector failed, and a power spike fried my computer. I know it smoked the power supply, ran back an forth to Vegas 2x yesterday getting new power supply (my luck, 1st out of box was faulty) |angry| . I pulled my drives out and swapped them with MadHatter's computer. Nothing happens.

My computer is with a local tech right now and I'm anxiously awaiting the phone call on how much of my components were toasted. OMG I haven't backed up for about a month, and of couse I backed up to my secondary drive which appears to also be toast. |banghead|

I've started the process of filing a claim with APC for them to repay me for all the components fried, but that sure as hell won't replace all the data I lost. |cry|

If this local tech can't do it, does anyone know of a good service for trying to recover data off fried drives, hopefully one that wouldn't be too upset to recover a boat load of adult content? I'd appreciate any suggestions or companies people have.

I'll keep ya'all updated. At least MadHatter is up and running np, all the link lists are getting checked so that is continuing on as normal, so no worries there.

Believe it or not, since I got this terabyte server, I have been backing up daily. I have been doing this for about 2 weeks now. A first for me since I have never backed up my pc before.

http://www.dantz.com/
http://maxtor.com/

For a few hundred $$$ you can have automated backups happening while you sleep. It's a tax write off and worth more then every penny.

My hard drives are not fried. |bananna| My motherboard shorted out which fried my power supply, and my processor, but the drives were spared. I'm sooooo happy. I'm also ready to shoot the guy that built this computer for me. Finding out all kinds of stuff he did that shouldn't have been done....like using a sata drive as your primary drive is a no no, and the case was a piece of CRAP, and the motherboard was a piece of CRAP.

I should be getting my baby back in a few hours. I'm going to spend the next 24 backing up on DVD all the critical stuff, plus this will give me two backup drives to use, and keep my C drive for just programs.

Isn't their software you can buy that will backup your files to a secondary drive nightly? and just write over what files have been changed? Anyone know?

I hear you Jim on the backing up. I have fried more hard drives then I care to admit to, so I KNOW to backup. I'm definitely changing my tune after this scare, I've been too busy lately to do it, no excuse!

That dantz looks good, and like it would do what I want. I'm also going to talk to the tech and ask what he recommends, I'd like to burn critical stuff on dvd, but if I can set something to automatically backup everything from one drive to another as a copy, I have less chance of frying 3 drives at once, although knowing me, that is within the realm of possibilities. I am static woman, lol. |shocking|

Damn V...sorry to hear about the cooked puter :(

Glad you were able to salvage those drives though...that's a big WooHoo!

As to the backups, I use Norton Ghost...saves an updated image of my local drives twice a day to an external usb drive. Then once a week, clears the usb drive and saves a complete image of local drives. Very slick program |thumb

That is what the tech suggested too. I'm going to get the program, and since I have 2 drives now for storage, I'll build on one, and have it backup to the 2nd one at least 1x a day.

Right now I'm going through the long process of re-installing all my programs. Since we installed a new os drive and to use the sata drives as my data drives, all the programs have to be reinstalled. But this is a headache I'll gladly do.

He talked me into a new processor, an AMD Sempron Processor, told me it will be faster than my old pentium 4 3.4 and he is right, I really like this, and my box stays very cool. :)

Yep, think you'll like Ghost |thumb

Cool on the new processor...as rough as computer hell is, at least there's an upside when you get some new faster hardware out of the misery...lol.

Well...not too sure about that one! Myself, I prefer a nice warm box :D

I'm in reinstall hell here.. forgot to back up my bookmarks to bookmarks.com so everything from like last June is gone, including some of my work stuff.. which i hate.

i did have a couple of flash drives here so i put as much as possible on that and it did save most of my ass. just forgot that some of the programs i'm so used to having like MS Office, the discs were lost in my move from Seattle to Vegas. |banghead| so having to start over there but have some nifty NEW programs to work with now *flashing eyez at mml*..

and i'm speeding along now.. so hopefully by this weekend i'll be up and cranking.

|thumb

Hey Ginnie!

How ya doing???

Sorry to hear about your PC woes!!

I have an external HD that I keep... after my laptop HD crashed a year ago, I back up everything on that external HD.. and I can back up all the PCs on my network :)

Say hello to MH for me!! I will never forget the hospitality y'all showed when I was in Vegas that one year !!

Cherry I would wait before you go and buy Ghost. It's a great program but MS offers a back up software for free built right in the OS. It's not the best but for what you are looking to do it will work just fine. You can set up a schedule for the back up. Not bad for free. Also I have looked around for free stuff with a little more options like being able to back up your data to a ftp site, then I found out that most ftp software will do this. But there is plenty of free stuff out there...

if you haven't taken a look at http://openoffice.org (free) as a replacement for the MS office programs, you might want to take a look. If you need an Access like clone, you have to shell out the $70 for http://staroffice.com/.

I've used openoffice.org for a number of years and have found it to be a good replacement. I only use wordprocessing and spreadsheet functions, but, it opens powerpoint presentations in 'impress', word docs in 'writer', excel spreadsheets in 'calc'. there is a math module for higher-level math and a draw module for drawing. Overall, I've found it to be quite good and almost MS Officelike. there are some things missing and some things that are better, but, overall, its done the job for me. And its free (well, I donated money so it wasn't free for me).

Speaking of open source, I've been using Abi Word for over a year now instead of MS Word. You'd never know the difference and can save files as .doc so Word users can open them. I just ordered (for free) an installation cd for Ubuntu, a linux OS. Open Office and Gimp come packaged with it. I'm seriously considering dumping WinXP entirely. It has been really pissing me off lately.

Use ghost - unlike microsofts backup its not going to get virus infections that exploit it, a problem I had last year. A good tip for you - instead of using USB hard drives buy 2 or 3 of the half gigabyte datasticks that plug into your USB. Now you mirror critical sites INCLUDING scripts and datafiles if any onto a folder in your hard drive and backup that folder onto the datasticks. Keep one datastick in your house, one in your car and one on your keyring. Programs can easily be re-installed - I have an extra datastick on my keyring that has the install binaries for a graphic editor an html editor, a script 'lint' type program I use and an FTP program, plus a text file that has the registration keys in. Barring nuclear attack I am safe against most things that would still leave me as a person standing.

If the web is your only income (it is mine now) then it makes sense to be paranoid about backups. I refresh my datasticks weekly or whenever I put up a major new site I care about.