My HD failure and backups

Hi folks, finally made the trip over this way, glad I did. Love the look of the place and yes, Mambo is one heck of a site builder, I love using it.

In the other place I was talking with a few of you about my 80 G Hard drive failure and I got loads of suggestions about fixing the drive and also about starting to do backups.

Big surprise the other day.

I took my drives into the workplace where I volunteer in their IT section, I am building their web site for them
[ http://www.alrm.org.au ].
Anyway, I hooked my drives up to a spare machine and my 'dead' dive showed up on the BIOS. Now, to say I was shocked just doesn't cover it!

After a loooong time Windows finally finished scanning the drive and booted up. Almost all of my stuff was still there. At least all the Family tree, the finances and my web site work was untouched. I lost some of of my clip-art files but that is small potatoes compared to what I had thought I had lost.

I have ripped off quite a bit off the files from the drive and my friend burned 2 DVD's worth for me. Unfortunately neither of our DVD ROM's can read them

My son also fiddled with the speed of the bus on my machine and now I can read the drive at home, though I only connect it if there is something I specifically want.

I have looked at what I can do to make regular backups but the Windows 2000 Backup program wont talk to a CD, it only looks for a tape drive. Maybe there is something else out there that i could be using that will let me do incremental burns to CD's?

Thanks to everybody for their information and support. It wasn't a good time for me and I am very grateful that I have had a reprieve from what seemed to be a total loss.

Cheers,

Ian

Hi Ian, glad you found us. Also glad to hear you were able to recover your data from the failed HD. That must have been quite a relief.

Mambo is one heck of a site builder, I love using it.

Click to expand...

Most folks here won't understand what you're talking about. Mambo is the portal software I used to create our web site, and the same one you used to create the web site you referenced. As you suggest, it's a great web publishing tool. However, I wasn't happy with the Simpleboard message board that integrates with Mambo, so I went on a search for something better. This forum and associated message boards use Simple Machines Forum (aka SMF) software, and it came out the winner among all the ones I researched. It's also proved to be rock solid. Most of the forum software packages have some kind of bridge to integrate with Mambo but, due to a couple of bad experiences I've had, I'm going in a different direction.

FWIW we've had a web site acting as a portal for several years. I switched the site over to Mambo approx 6 months ago (I'm losing track of time). At that time I also moved everything to a new hosting company.

Ian, I have taken to backing up my drives from time to time using ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE 8.0.  I back them up to both a "secure" partition on the hard drive itself (useful in some cases) and an external HD (useful in all cases but a dog to lug around) if you don't need it.

History: Drive gave warning, Acronis installed and back up to external drive performed
Drive failed, Replaced with 3x bigger drive and Restored from backup, no major losses

New drive divided into two segments (2x original "Working" 1x original "Secure back up"

Software messed up trassing my most important program (the one I'm using now) and no amount of fix would fix it
(restore from on-board backup worked, nothing lost)

Since I could, I did the research, causing it to fail again and again, each time restoreing from the back up, no loss

Since then, I  back up before any major change/update (local flie) and regularry to the external as well

Drive failures do not scare me

So far I've had about five drives fail, 3 of them right after a back up operation... The value of backups can not be diminished