Death of a Hard Drive

[diordna]

The directory tree fell out from under important parts of my HD yesterday and I had to reformat. All my code and files are safe (separate HD), but it's going to take me way too long to get all my settings back. It was weird because even though my home folder suddenly appeared to have nothing in it, I could still say Cmd-shift-G, "~/Documents" and still go there and have everything in it.

I think I'm also going to try to install Edgy Eft somewhere, though it may require me to reformat again because it appears that the first, small partition I made is the one that was causing all the problems before, and it needs that partition to put booting things...

I guess you could call this a practice run for when I get my new lappy in a few weeks.

I don't really know why I'm posting this. Maybe my subconscious wants sympathy. Or maybe to remind all of you that making backups is damned important.

[DoG]

If you really wanna keep your data safe, I can recommend stone tablets (preferably granite).

The next best thing is probably a mirror drive, not some lame backup, as one tends to not back up stuff that turns out important in retrospect.

Also, I havent seen a corrupt file system, yet, with OS X, so if you have problems, I suggest getting all your data from the offending drive into a safe place as long as you can, as it's very likely that you are looking at a progressive hardware failure.

[ERaZer]

My MacBooks HD died a month or so ago, that was really painful, I had worked a lot on programming lately and my last backup was from januari...

[diordna]

The next best thing is probably a mirror drive, not some lame backup, as one tends to not back up stuff that turns out important in retrospect.
I don't know if I agree entirely with that. I don't see a need to back up the whole OS. What I've been doing is backing up everything I can't download easily. Of course, it's easy to miss something, so mirroring is the safest option.

Also, I havent seen a corrupt file system, yet, with OS X, so if you have problems, I suggest getting all your data from the offending drive into a safe place as long as you can, as it's very likely that you are looking at a progressive hardware failure.
I thought this also. I've decided to take this machine off development duty and just wait until I get a new laptop. When I'm finished with it, we'll put in a new HD and start from scratch again.

I'll probably post again after lunch after I try installing Ubuntu on it. If anyone has experience with PPC Linux, could you pop in and tell me if there are any major hurdles?

[Joseph Duchesne]

I tried to get PPC linux working a few times, but was never successful. Mind you this was circa 2001. I hope things have changed. On a brighter note, you should probably look for a liveCD or a mac specific distro so you can either test compatibility first, or be relatively certain of compatibility.

[Jake]

Good job backing up, hopefully anyone who reads this who isn't backing up will start right now (don't put it off). It took a very close call for me to start backing up more than every 3 weeks on a DVD, which doesn't cut it when you lose 30 hours of work between backups...

Interestingly enough my backup drive needed reformatting yesterday, so I just had to reformat it and setup my backup utility to target the new drive :)

[diordna]

Ubuntu's only installation option is via LiveCD. I have one from Hoary lying around, and that worked fine in the past, but I tried one from Edgy today and it didn't like my video card, so I'm moving back to Dapper to see if I can install it that way and then upgrade. Kind of annoying.

[ThemsAllTook]

This thread gave me another kick to get my data backed up properly. I've been getting increasingly worried about something happening, so I just ordered a 250 GB external drive. Once that arrives and my important stuff is safely mirrored on it, I'll be able to sleep a lot more easily...

[MattDiamond]

There is a potential problem with mirroring though. My last hard drive problem caused files to start disappearing. Would those have gotten mirrored? Depends on how you mirror them, I guess.

I have an automated process (using SuperDuper) that maintains a mirror by backing up changed files every other night to an internal drive. (A hardware mirror or RAID system would probably be better than this.) Once or twice a month I manually back up to an external drive.

One thing I'm not doing is some sort of offsite backup. I may create an archive of my irreplaceable documents and upload it to my website's host.

[ThemsAllTook]

Yeah, I'll be doing all of the mirroring manually. As for offsite backups, I usually just store a few of the more important things on my computer at work. I've also thought about uploading stuff to my web host, but haven't really looked into it yet.

[Frank C.]

I've had the OS X "missing system files" syndrome more than once and lost a whole drive of important data way way back (running OS 9, when 2GB drives where considered huge). I'm paranoid now, cloning my system disks every month, and keeping the last three clones handy. I back up my home directories separately usually mid-month, and back up my work daily. All these backups are backed-up onto two or three different drives, in different rooms :sneaky:

For anyone who doesn't believe in cloning the whole drive - just do it, gigabytes are cheap nowadays. Until you loose a system disk you don't realize how much crap has actually been installed. With a clone (and a spare drive) you can be back up and running in an hour or two, without a clone it's easily a day or more downtime. I've been through both scenarios...

As far as Ubuntu (or partitioning in general) goes I've used GParted on the live CD to partition and un-partition NTFS/ext3 drives multiple times and never had any unintentional data loss. I can't vouch for its PPC or hfs+ support however.

[PowerMacX]

Well, for small projects a simple zip => Gmail every other day (or whenever I made some significant progress) is a good failsafe for me, while DVD backups (later copied to another machine, in a different city) are done on a "whenever I realize its been too long since the last one"-basis :)

(I know, I should probably use encrypted disk images instead of zip files but, considering most of it is PHP code it's not exactly "secret" code anyway)

[OneSadCookie]

Subversion, Subversion, Subversion.

On another machine of course. Dreamhost is a cheap "other machine" :)

[Joseph Duchesne]

A cheap 2GB memory stick holds my essentials and it's on my person at all times. I also have backups on DVDs done monthly, and copies on two webservers and three computers. I may be paranoid, but I haven't lost any data since my powerbook's drive crashed during uDevGames 2004. (redoing two weeks of programming during a time critical contest is something that I hope to never repeat).

[diordna]

I'm posting this from Linux. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to recognize anything other than 1024x768, even after all sorts of shenanigans with xorg.conf, which really needs a freaking graphical editor that isn't based on ncurses. I had to boot into single user mode to fix it once...eurgh.

Trying to get some sort of music player to work. Rhythmbox keeps freezing. Also, I can't get any kind of Java due to the lack of a sun-javaX-bin package in the repos. (Probably due to my PPC-ness.)

[OneSadCookie]

What video hardware do you have?

ATI should be OK, NVidia not so much.

[diordna]

ATI should be OK, NVidia not so much.
I've heard the opposite, that ATI has horrible support and nVidia is great. Either way, I've got an ATI Radeon 7500.

Linux didn't work so well today. It successfully launches GNOME only about half the time and I have no idea why. Also, sound pretty much doesn't work. On the other hand, it has some nifty games...without sound. And it has great audio software...without sound.

I'd get help on the forums, but they're constantly clogged and any new topic is on page 3 within an hour.

[OneSadCookie]

What you've heard applies to x86, and refers to the vendors' proprietary drivers.

For PowerPC, there are no accelerated drivers for NVidia. The open-source ATI ones work for older (< X1k) Radeons.

I've booted Edgy on a last-gen iBook, and it worked fine (including accelerated graphics and sound). That's my only recent experience with PowerPC Linux.

[Carlos Camacho]

I can recommend stone tablets (preferably granite).
Ha, tell Mel Brooks that. ;)