I had a bit of a scare last night with my computer last night.
I have spent the past several days doing some work for a client and am travelling out to their office today to deploy the work on their servers. The plan was to download the release from Subversion onto a workstation and upload to their server (and updates configs and all that).
Last night at 9pm, my main pc wouldnât start. I could hear the fan humming and disks spinning, but nothing showing up on the monitorânot even bios set-up screens. Itâs a four-year-old Dell Dimension 9150, so the pc isnât new and I expect there to be problems from time-to-time, but this kind of problem couldnât happen at all those times I donât have any clients?
My main development PC gets backed up once a week to an external hard drive using Acronis True Image. My PC also wakes from hibernate every morning at 2am and takes a local backup from all my websites and databases hosted on different web servers. I have a Subversion repository hosted off-site where I keep all my code. Iâve thought a lot about disaster recovery. But it wasnât enough.
I wasnât concerned about the PC as much as I was concerned about the code. But, as much as I tell my developers to check-in every day, I was a bit lazy here and didnât do it myself for two days.
After Googling the problem for a while (on my laptop) I found the issue was some RAM had gone bad. I took memory out one by one until the computer would start again. I breathed a sigh of relief. Eventually removed two RAM modules (bringing my pc from 4gb down to 2gb)âand the first thing I did was check my code into Subversion. So after a few hours of panic, everything was fine.
Hereâs the problem with my backup strategyâitâs not regular enough. Itâs geared for a hard-drive failure more than anything else. If my pc completely packs it in, I can restore my operating system, hard drives and everything else onto a new boxâbut my backup only runs once a week. I could be 6 days out of date. I need to increase it. Besides, I live in Oxfordshire. Itâs not like Iâm in San Diego where you can swing down to Fries at 9pm on a Sunday night and pick up a hard drive.
If youâve ever had a hard drive fail, you know how important back-ups areâbut they got to be automated or they wonât happen. When you get paid for the work you do on your computer, itâs even more important.
Hey Eric, I never usually plug commercial stuff because I know that there is always somebody who will say what I use is not as good as what they use. I just use a few core apps that work for me.When I left the UK a couple of years ago I had almost everything I owned in a shipping container that would not be opened for months. It was packed when we sold up but I continued working for a couple more months at Paribas and then took 6 weeks to hit New Zealand followed by about a month to find a house to rent and get it all delivered.I wanted to be doubley, tripley and quadrupily sure that at least a core of about 50GB or so family photos etc would not be gone forever in a perfect storm of my shipping container lost to pirates, my laptop getting stolen and my portable hard drive giving up the ghost.A service I engaged and continue to use is iDrive. I pay USD49.95 every year and that gives me up to 150GB of storage on the net. The backup client is great. I can time when it kicks into action or set it to continuous. It can also back up folders on network drives. It can keep historical versions of files and do partial updates as well as using pre-compression to save bandwidth. On top of all that I can get back any of my files or folders from any browser via their web access. It is owned by AOL so they should be around for a while.It might be a partial solution to your immediate concerns.Later dude, from down under.EdwardPS. When are you coming to visit. We have plenty of room.