[Leica] Computer help!!!

[images at InfoAve.Net (Tina Manley)]

At 09:42 PM 7/20/2005, you wrote:
>It is not plausible that an external hard drive will "show up" but have no 
>files on it. I'd take those disks to a responsible computer store and ask 
>them to have a look-see. This is not a job for amateurs computer people.

In South Carolina?  I've had the Dell "experts" come out for next day 
service and they know less about computers than I do - and that's not a 
lot.  I got advice about a shop that was supposed to know a lot about 
computers and they had never even seen an SATA internal drive.  They had no 
idea what kind of connection it was.  I did get an estimate to recover all 
of the data the last time my hard drives failed.  The data recovery company 
in Charlotte said it would be between $2500 and $5000 depending on how long 
it took with no guarantees of getting anything.

 > RAID is a waste of money for backup. Its intended purpose is to make you 
not need to DO backup.

Thanks!  That's what I wanted to know.

>I use only Seagate disks, and I never buy the newest or the biggest. My 
>current fixation is on Seagate Barracuda ST3400832A-RL disks, which are 
>ATA and not SATA, but they are cheap and reliable. I have 12 of them. I 
>make backups in rotation, 1-12, and when I fill disk 12, I erase disk 1 
>and start the rotation over again.

I could have bought Seagate, but was told that Western Digital were the 
best so I have three.  Now I know.


>NEVER back up on an internal hard drive. Use USB or FireWire, always. Or 
>put the disks in another box.\

My backups were on external Lacie's, one USB and one Firewire.


>I recommend against leaving the hard drive connected to the computer when 
>you are not backing up.

That's probably a factor.  They stay connected and get really hot.  I had 
the backups set to run every Friday night at midnight, but they sometimes 
took two days to back everything up and when they are backing up the 
computer is worthless for anything else!!  When my computer failed, it 
failed on Wednesday night after I had been working non-stop since 
Friday.  I lost all of that work.


>I do backups via Ethernet to a server down the hall. The server runs 
>Retrospect; it reaches out to the client computers and grabs their files 
>and saves them. You can also run Retrospect on the computer being backed 
>up, and have it direct its output to a server. But if you don't have 
>Ethernet, this isn't an option for you.

I have a wireless connection to all of the computers in the house.  Right 
now it is down because it runs through my big computer which can't connect 
to the internet since I installed the Windows XP Service Pack 2.  My 
daughter is really upset with me.  She can't connect to her Muggle support 
site from her computer.  My laptop still connects to the internet, though, 
which makes no sense.  The cable support people said that's not possible 
but here I am!

I would consider Macs but it's way too late.  Every peripheral that I have 
is Windows-based, from scanners to printers to hard drives.  I have tons of 
Windows-based software that I could never replace.

Thanks, Brian.  At least I know not to consider RAIDs.  That seemed way too 
complicated anyway.  I'll just plan on gradually replacing all of my hard 
drives with Seagates and keeping the backup hard drives turned off.

I've also ordered 500 DVDs to back everything up that way.  If I had backed 
up the slide shows that I was working on onto DVDs, I wouldn't be pulling 
my hair out right now.

Thanks --

Tina