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Comment backups, backups, backups (Score 1) 247

If you're talking about recovery tools, you're already on the wrong track. A Time Capsule costs $300. How much is your data worth? How much are the tools going to cost to recover it? How much is your time worth? I'll bet that the sum of those last three things is a whole pile more than 300 bucks.

If I were you, the thing I'd buy right now is a good backup solution. Re: your existing data, take a full image of your hard disk and take your time recovering it.

Once you've new backup system, you can then sit there with a big smile on your face and comment smugly on all future /. posts about data loss.

Have I lost data? Hell yeah. And it will never happen again.

-bh

Comment backups and backups of backups (Score 1) 304

zfs or hardware raid on all servers. bacula for all MS windows systems and all servers which are switched on most of the time. Apple Time Capsules for all the macs. regular backups of all phones. auto-sync of all address-book and calendar info over icloud.

as you ask, why yes, i have lost data in the past due to lack of backups. ain't gonna happen again.

-bh

NASA

Submission + - Europe's space agency wants to do what NASA can't (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: The European Space Agency is moving forward with a plan to land an autonomous spacecraft on the moon by 2017, with the idea a manned vehicle could land there sometime in the future. It's a mission NASA had on its roadmap before the current budget debate, but such plans seem doomed now. The ESA is now seeking proposals for a Lunar Lander that would land on the south polar region of the Moon where possible deposits of water ice, heavily cratered terrain and long periods of sunlight make it ripe for explorers and scientists, the agency stated.

Comment upgrade? (Score 1) 433

So, given that upgrades from windows 2.0 to windows 3.0 were never supported, windows 3.1 to windows 95 didn't work at all, windows 95 to windows 98 mostly didn't work; windows 98 to XP was a fail city and XP to vista was disasterous, why on earth does anyone expect windows vista to windows 7 to have any chance of working?

Seriously, what person in their right mind would even _attempt_ an upgrade?

Comment Not ireland's oldest ISP (Score 1) 169

Eircom are not ireland's oldest ISP. They started operations as an ISP in 1996 (or in 1995 as Indigo, which they later bought out) and at the time, there were several other operators in the market: eunet ireland (the oldest commercial), ireland online, heanet (nren), connect ireland and internet eireann.

Comment You're kidding, aren't you?? (Score 5, Insightful) 536

You are kidding about this, aren't you?

Let me get the facts straight:

- you have "mission critical files", and the network you're transferring them over is so incredibly badly managed that it doesn't support reliable data transfer
- you want a technical workaround for this brokenness.

If this is the case, you don't have a technical problem on your hands; you have a political one.

"Mission critical" has a meaning: it means critical to the success of the operation. I.e. without these files, your operation or someone else's operation will fail.

If your management believes that your files are "mission critical", and you're facing a problem of this sort, you need to document the difficulties you're having, along with measurements to support your claims and then make a clear statement that as long as your network path is completely broken, you are absolving yourself of responsiblility for the correct transmission of these files.

If your management doesn't do anything about this, then the files are not "mission critical".

Comment Be careful about your hardware and software (Score 1) 210

If you're going to to this, you really need to be very careful about your choice of hardware and software. You need to avoid anything which isn't AHCI 1.3 compliant, as previous versions of the AHCI specification defined only a single FIS register per port, which effectively means that the controller card has to serialise all commands to the port multiplier. So even if you've got a port multiplier with a pile of separate disks, your throughput is going to be trash because the host operating system can only talk to a single disk at any one time. AHCI 1.3 fixes this and allows the host operating system to talk to multiple drives simultaneously.

You also need to be careful in your choice of software driver and operating system. Most of the free unix clones have some form of support for port multipliers these days, but this support is not really optimised towards high performance from sensible hardware yet. NCQ (native command queueing) is really important for performance here. I'll guess that with Windows drivers, you just won't know in advance, because the drivers aren't open source and you just can't tell what's going on inside them.

As previous people mentioned, it's important to configure multiple disks like this in some form of redundant mode. If you have a single volume spread across 5 disks, your risk of failure is going to be 5 times more likely than for a single disk, and the consequences of losing that data is 5 times worse than that of a single disk.

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