Disaster!

My mickey-mouse solution to backing up my hard drive has been the use of Norton Ghost once a week. More often if I am generating a lot of work during the week. My 320 GB hard drive takes about 30 minutes to clone; that's a lot faster than trying to copy gigs of info over to another hard drive via the window's explorer copy command

I use two identical hard drives, and clone the first one to the second one.

I always clone the disk prior to installing new software too, just in case something goes wrong.

I like this method better than a mirrored drive set-up, as mirroring a hard drives has it's own major downside to it.

Something to think about in this new year.

Regards,

Tommy
 
I'm always fiddling, and like to keep an up-to-date copy of the last best files in case the last fiddle ruins everything ;)
So I went looking for a utility that will only update newer files, rather than laboriously copy everything, the way Windows Explorer wants to do.
I found the freeware Karen's Replicator which whips through and updates files to another network drive in short order.
It can be automated to do this daily, say.
This way, I always have a backup of the last set of critical files in the sim.
So far so good, thought this might be useful to you too.
 
Wing_Z

Will give that utility a try....being able to back up just the changed files will be a nice alternative to having to back up an entire sim install.

OBIO
 
I've had it happen too, Obio. after we moved here from Hawaii, before I had had a chance to backup my files on another computer(which I should have done before moving) my secondary hardrive containing an enormous amount of my music...lyrics, live performances including the last show I did on Maui before we left and a bunch of other irreplaceable stuff.. bit the dust....I had a couple guys try to retrieve the data, especially the live shows and lyrics but, sadly it's gone...the hardrive is still around here somewhere and maybe someone will come up with a new technique for retreival. Such is life...I feel for ya, Bro!
 
Hey, Obio, do you have an external tray for SATA drives? I have both an external enclosure, and a hot docking station. They are very inexpensive, and since they are USB, they can be used to turn your HDD into a slave, so you can retrieve the files without the boot sector working. I had this happen with two IDE drives, just removed them from internal, mounted them in external enclosures, and saved all the files. After that was done, I simply reformatted them, and reinstalled internal. They are both still working in my wife's unit, 3 years later.
 
Hey OBIO,


Man.. I feel your pain. This happened to me 2 years ago, and I had Lionheart Creations on it..

Since then, I have learned to have backups of backups and to be responsible on backing up 'alot'...


I havent read all the input from others and I am sure they are repeats of what I am about to say. You might not be able to afford a really good backup HD, but get one anyway. In the future, when you can afford a class A backup HD, get it. For now, you can get super basic 'jumpers' that are under $20.00, nice plug in jumpers that are about $40.00, and you get a 'internal' HD and plug that in and just start transferring your data over for backups, and then store that puppy nicely in your desk drawer. (I have like 7 of them).


On your lost drive, you might be able to have the data saved by data pro's online. I think Henry knows a good group. might take a week, but you should be able to get your photos back (family and all), and perhaps some of your birds. So long as you havent attempted to add things, which would overwrite the 'floating' unlinked files.


When files are deleted, they still exist on your HD. They are only 'de-linked' from a master link, such as C:\My Documents\Photos... Once its link is gone, its floating in the land of 'no links, thus gonzo'... There are data search programs that retrieve those unlinked files and programs (and virus') and such. Be careful as deleted virus' can exist in that 'danger zone' as well.

Overwriting (downloading and installing) new data onto your HD will be overwriting those files that are de-linked, so beware of that too. The more you use it, the more files are being lost to new writing..



Bill
 
The drive that I lost everything on was a secondary drive...D:, a slave drive. C drive is fine and the system is running smoothly. I was able to use a neat little utility to retrieve the "lost" files...but they were either damaged or they were not in any recognizable order....I had hundreds of config files that were simply free floating, thousands and thousands of bmps from various paints that were associated with no particular plane. I said phooey on it....formatted the drive three times, ran a number of disc check utilities on it and they all came back fine.....I am just going to build from scratch one really super install with all the freeware bells and whistles I can stuff into it in terms of mesh, scenery...and install just those planes that I actually fly on a regular basis...no point in having 800 planes installed if they only got flown on the day I installed them.

OBIO
 
Hi,

and install just those planes that I actually fly on a regular basis...no point in having 800 planes installed if they only got flown on the day I installed them.
Click to expand...

I take this way sometime ... and 12 months after I have 800 planes installed .. etc ... :icon_lol: :icon_lol:
 
There's a lot that d/l, fly, then shove off into a hangar folder on another drive. I'm currently at 31 addon folders installed, with another 277 mothballed.
 
Tom Clayton said:
There's a lot that d/l, fly, then shove off into a hangar folder on another drive. I'm currently at 31 addon folders installed, with another 277 mothballed.
Click to expand...

Wow Tom, it looks like if you start now to fly a touch and go with each aircraft you have hangared, you may be able to just land the last one by the time your grandchild asks, "Hey Grandad, what did you do during the war"?...:icon_lol:
 
I didn't even include the 237 folders that contain the Transload fleet stashed in a different folder!:kilroy:
 
Obio I know how you feel, I was hit with a virus on new years day and had to wipe both hard drives. Last night (tuesday) I just finished installing and setting everything up.

Fortunately I lost very little, all my FS9 aircraft and scenery files etc are backed up on an external HD.

I was running NOD32, now it AVG free anti virus!

Happy days
 
Sorry to hear about the SNAFU. I may seem old fashioned here, I save every download on CDs. I got over 60 of them. If there is a "meltdown" at least I can start over.
 
I used to keep everything to CDs, till I found that all the ones I have that are over 4 years old are useless. Why?? I dunno. They worked fine for years, then suddenly they all quit. Nothing but errors or "unreadable" And NOT just on one player/unit. This happened to almost a dozen CDs, different brands, burnt on different computers. Luckily it was mostly stuff from FS2002 or earlier, but there was also three disks of personal stuff. Only 1 of those disks still works, as of 2 months ago. I started buying multiple external harddrives after that, burn everything to two different disks and try to keep only one of each turned on at a time.

Is everything backed up? No, but my personal stuff is copied to at least three diffeent external disks at any one time, plus I now use Carbonite backup system. This requires what I want to keep special on the C drive.

My FS stuff is on 5 different drives, right now. I have backed all my payware stuff to DVD, but I'm still not trusting that as permanent. (What really is????)
 
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