Odd Grinding Noises...

[swestrup]

... have just started coming from my computer. So far, I'm thinking it sounds more like a failing fan than a failing disk drive, but I can't be sure.

I think I'd better make a full backup tonight. The last one was a month or so ago (and when was the last time YOU made a full backup of your computer???)

Comments

[metawidget]

Monday. But, along with flossing, it's been something I've been making an effort to do more often for a few months.

Good luck, I hope it's a fan!

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

My CPU fan is dying too. Maybe there's a virus going around? :)

I haven't made a full backup in a while, but I run a RAID in my desktop. Does that count? I guess not. Doh.

[swestrup]

Well, a Raid is certainly better than nothing. It saves you from single-drive failure (presuming thats the kind of raid you're using) but it doesn't do anything to help in the case of the old 'rm -rf *' oopsie.

Personal Backup Strategy

[bcwhite.livejournal.com]

Everyone needs a personal backup strategy (http://www.backgroundexposure.com/blog/index.php/2007/01/17/backup-strategies/) or one day they're going to get caught! Use multiple, off-site backups if your data is important.

Re: Personal Backup Strategy

[swestrup]

Oh, I have a personal backup strategy. I have a removable 200GB drive that I sync my current system to.

The problem is that the time taken to perform a backup has steadily increased from a few hours to a couple of days, so I no longer do them weekly, but more like once a month or so.

I've decided that I'm probably going to invest in a standalone backup server that will regularly sync my (and the other household) systems over the network, but right now I have no cash, so I'm making due with the old slow solution.

(The solution worked great when I had only a 20 gig drive. An order of magnitude more to backup has really slowed things down.)

Re: Personal Backup Strategy

[bcwhite.livejournal.com]

My home directory is on a RAID5 array with over 250GB of available space, about 50% full. It takes my rsync script less than an hour (sometimes only 10 minutes if changes are few) to backup to an external HD.

When I was sysadmin for a company, I used Amanda and a DDS4 drive to do nightly backups. It works quite well over the network but you need a unix machine to run it.

Re: Personal Backup Strategy

[swestrup]

My current web server and router boxes are linux based. My file server will be too, when I can afford to build it. My plan is to use Amanda, as it has both Linux and Windows clients.

Its just my personal machine and the two my wife uses for business that run Windows.

As for the time it takes to back up my system, my best guess is that there is something slowing down my hard drive. It may well be the well-known Windows bug that on a sector retry it will slow down a drive, but it will never speed it back up. Or maybe some sort of obscure driver issue. In any case, it currently takes about 3 hours just to do the initial compare to find out what has changed, before even beginning the backup, and I usually have many gigs of changes. (Video editing will do that.)

I'm currently using Backer. I used to use a window's port of rsync but I found out the hard way that its internal file size counter is 32 bits and rolls over at 4 GB. Thus, if I transfer a 4GB+3K file, I end up with only the last 3K. I've yet to determine if this is also a problem on my Linux boxen, but I do worry.