SSD...WOW

[spec]

Last week at night, it rained after few months of winter. Next morning I fell down twice from motorbike. First time I almost got squeezed my balls from leg-guard and second time I got a hole in my pant near the knee. There was a truck sleeping upside down near the road too.

Hope you didn't get hurt too bad and are not speaking with a high voice after the ball squeeze. Also hope they were not your best pants. "truck sleeping upside down" --wonderful term

Motor bikes: great things, I love 'em, but bloody dangerous- just two bits of rubber the size of footprints keeping you from disaster. I had some incidents on bikes too:

It was January 1964, and the weather was quite mild after a cold snap. I was on a 150 mile trip doing around 40 MPH around a bend in the country, near Cambridge UK. Ahead was a long row of people waiting for a bus. Right away I saw the glint of the sun reflected from a long sheet of ice on the road in front of them. There was nothing I could do, so i just hung on. I can remember noticing the peoples legs passing by as the bike slid down the road on its tank and my foot. Finally the bike stopped at the last chap in the queue who said, "I enjoyed that. Can you do it again?"

 

[atferrari]

The message is to regularly back them up (just like i haven't yet).
spec

After loosing all my data reports, laboral and administrative, equivalent to 6 months, I became serious about that.

I recently read that no matter the disk, failures occur always the day before the planned back up.

 

[spec]

After loosing all my data reports, laboral and administrative, equivalent to 6 months, I became serious about that.

I recently read that no matter the disk, failures occur always the day before the planned back up.

Yes, too true. You can get very blase about backing your stuff. I have just spent a week on and off recovering my Outlook stuff when Google Gmail IMAP threw a wobbly.

The worst time for me though was in the early IBM PC days. We had been working on a proposal for the MOD for around a month and it had not gone well; often we worked 18hrs straight. The day before the deadline for submission we found another problem and I got the job of doing a fix. At about 2am I had finally finished and went to get a coffee from the vending machine down the hallway. While I was at the vendor there was a power cut which lasted half an hour. About four hours worth of data was lost when my PC was rebooted. That taught me a big lesson and since then I have been very strict about saving and backing up...when I can be bothered that is

 

[granddad]

All , Thanks for the backup reminder..... not that my stuff is worth "thousands of $ " or even pennies ! I have a small freecom (1x250G) drive, but 3 PC's..... will do it tomorrow ...

 

[strantor]

Just one word of caution though: although SSDs have no moving parts and are reasonably immune to shock and vibration, they are inherently error prone things at the silicon level and
should not be used as the only store for any valuable data. It is only by some very sophisticated error correcting algorithms that they are usable.

Wow, I had no idea. I learn something new every day! Actually, I think my subconscious demands that I learn something every day. That would explain my insomnia.

The message is to regularly back them up (just like i haven't yet).

spec

Thanks for the reminder! I have that laptop set to automatically back up to my NAS every time it connects to my home network. But my NAS isn't connected right now; hasn't been in months, since I moved into this new house. Still in a box somewhere. I really need to exhume it and use it.

 

[spec]

Wow, I had no idea. I learn something new every day! Actually, I think my subconscious demands that I learn something every day. That would explain my insomnia.


Thanks for the reminder! I have that laptop set to automatically back up to my NAS every time it connects to my home network. But my NAS isn't connected right now; hasn't been in months, since I moved into this new house. Still in a box somewhere. I really need to exhume it and use it.

Yes, it came as a surprise to me too. The adage is always legislate for the worst. So with a NAS for example you have each HDD shadowed and you should also store you data not just in a different location but in a different country on the cloud. I used to think that all this was on the extreme side, but when our house was destroyed by a gas explosion, the shock wave, or heat wrecked most electronic equipment- the items looked ok but malfunctioned in odd ways. Now I am dead careful and think about backing up properly, but somehow never get around to doing it.

I don't know how much data you have, but my laptop takes around 24Hrs to back up, which is a real pain. CORRECTION (2016_02_12) 12 Hrs not 24 Hrs

 

[strantor]

I don't know how much data you have, but my laptop takes around 24Hrs to back up, which is a real pain.

Wow, That's just silly!
I don't know exactly how much time it takes because:
A. It's been months since I did it.
B. Back when I was doing it regularly, I was doing incremental backups; only modified files were synced, so it didn't take long.
But IIRC (I probably don't), I thin my first bacup took 4-6hrs. That was about 100GB, over my home hardwired gigabit lan, and it might have been with my old HDD, not sure.
If I did it over 10/100Mbit lan or wifi, it might take 24hrs though. Across what type of network are you doing yours?

 

[spec]

Wow, That's just silly!
I don't know exactly how much time it takes because:
A. It's been months since I did it.
B. Back when I was doing it regularly, I was doing incremental backups; only modified files were synced, so it didn't take long.
But IIRC (I probably don't), I thin my first bacup took 4-6hrs. That was about 100GB, over my home hardwired gigabit lan, and it might have been with my old HDD, not sure.
If I did it over 10/100Mbit lan or wifi, it might take 24hrs though. Across what type of network are you doing yours?

Silly is a word that worries me

My Lenovo T520 laptop has:
500 GB SSD as C:
ITB HDD in the Ultra Bay as E:

It currently has the following large file groups, in addition to the other usual stuff:
72 GB of images
198 GB of edocs
362 GB of music

I also have less immediate data on USB HDDs

Why not have this on a NAS or on the cloud?
Well I have tried that but it didn't work.
Often when visiting in the country or on site somewhere there is no internet coverage so you would be stuck.

Our house NAS averages 10MB sec and a system image back up using MS Backup takes around 12 Hrs- I previously said 24 hours but that was an error.
I have used Acronis back up in the past but didn't get on with it.
Incremental back ups are attractive at first sight but, in my very limited experience, they can go wrong, and when they do, they go wrong in a big way.

In reality, backing up is a chore and I have not learned about it sufficiently or configured it properly, mainly due to lack of discipline and lack of interest.
My son, runs and hires out servers and is horrified by my caviler attitude and it is only because of his constant nagging that I have a NAS and do backups now and then.

One approach that I have found useful is to put all your user files: images, edocs, music, Word, Outlook .ost, etc etc in one directory and back that from time to time as straight files rather than an image. That approach has got me out of a pickle on a number of occasions. Note that you must ensure that the file paths, including file name, do not exceed 255 characters or the file will not be saved and you will get an error message. I think there is a way to fix this shortcoming, but I am not sure.

It was great at work: all the housekeeping stuff was done by system admin and the whole thing was backed up every night- trouble is that made me lazy.

 

[spec]

All , Thanks for the backup reminder..... not that my stuff is worth "thousands of $ " or even pennies ! I have a small freecom (1x250G) drive, but 3 PC's..... will do it tomorrow ...

Yes, very wise- the unexpected, once in a thousand year disaster happens regularly, in my experience. Your data may not be worth much in absolute terms, but I bet it is worth a fortune to you.

One worrying scenario would be if your laptop/PC was stolen. I had a big scare a few months ago. I was in town with my laptop and left it in a cafe by accident. I didn't realise for about 4 hours. Amazingly, when I went back to the cafe the laptop was still under the table where I left it. I did a back up that night.

 

[spec]

My aging battery wouldn't let the laptop run more than ~45min before; now with the SSD it's got better battery life than it did new.

That is a good point that replacing a HDD with an SSD extends your battery life. The other big power gobbler is your display. If you turn the brightness down you can extend battery endurance quite a bit.

Incidentally, when a laptop battery loses capacity, or fails outright, it is often caused by one or two individual battery cells in the pack. It is possible to open up battery packs and either replace the faulty cells (18650), or salvage the good cells

Charging cells in series is never a good idea and sometimes you can discharge and charge a seemingly dud cell and it will recover. Why they do not charge the cells individually in battery packs, I just can't understand

 

[atferrari]

One worrying scenario would be if your laptop/PC was stolen.

Maybe two years ago, I think it was in Facebook (??), the story of a student who lost ALL his data for the final tesis colected along several years. He was literally begging for it not for the stolen laptop. Awful.

EDIT
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3013002/posts

EDIT/

 

[spec]

Maybe two years ago, I think it was in Facebook (??), the story of a student who lost ALL his data for the final tesis colected along several years. He was literally begging for it not for the stolen laptop. Awful.

EDIT
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3013002/posts

Hola atferrari,

Hell, poor fellow. I suppose it is all too easy to say that he only has himself to blame.

There have been some big stinks in the UK when government officials have lost/had stolen laptops with highly confidential data, which amazingly, was not encrypted. With a few exceptions, I think most individuals, including me, are a wide open to loss of data.

By the way, I understand that Veracrypt is one of the best free encryption packages available at the moment.

My feeling is that back up facilities lag well behind what is technically possible. I don't know if this is feasible but I imagine an environment where backing up is continuous and automatic and part of the operating system, say with a processor solely dedicated to the task, so that the main processing functions are not hobbled.

spec

PS: I just noticed your tag line: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is.

 

[spec]

I have that laptop set to automatically back up to my NAS every time it connects to my home network.

Hi strantor,
Intresting- feel like explaining how that works. Does the auto backup slow your machine noticeably. Do you back up an image or files. As I said before I don't know much about backing up.

spec

 

[granddad]

Re Backup stories, (1) In the 198o's ( if my is memory 1/2 right ) we had a customer,(several employees) a sound lab using a PC with DOS and 2 x 5 1/4" floppy drives. ( that's all) mainly because it had a 16 port I/O board , one black day , it failed to boot, also backup failed to boot, drive had screwed both disks. mainly because both floppies were years old. I had a FE collect disks we and managed to recover some data, seems the whole business was surviving on a few microns of iron oxide......
(2) Large UK retail business , in-store office / stock system . back up done after store closing to removable HDs, system and backup disks then put in the safe ( with money ) , office goes down below zero degrees during the night. Next morning disks removed from safe , placed on drive....... power applied .... very nasty pinging sound ... disks crashed ... happened in several stores, not good , on inspection , water had condensed on HD aluminium platters. (this was only discovered after several such happenings ) not sure who got the blame..

 

[spec]

Re Backup stories, (1) In the 198o's ( if my is memory 1/2 right ) we had a customer,(several employees) a sound lab using a PC with DOS and 2 x 5 1/4" floppy drives. ( that's all) mainly because it had a 16 port I/O board , one black day , it failed to boot, also backup failed to boot, drive had screwed both disks. mainly because both floppies were years old. I had a FE collect disks we and managed to recover some data, seems the whole business was surviving on a few microns of iron oxide......
(2) Large UK retail business , in-store office / stock system . back up done after store closing to removable HDs, system and backup disks then put in the safe ( with money ) , office goes down below zero degrees during the night. Next morning disks removed from safe , placed on drive....... power applied .... very nasty pinging sound ... disks crashed ... happened in several stores, not good , on inspection , water had condensed on HD aluminium platters. (this was only discovered after several such happenings ) not sure who got the blame..

Araarg- the number of times that caution has led to disaster. What is the saying: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Floppy disks with their massive 360 Kbytes, followed by the incredible 1.4 M bytes: seems hard to believe now.

We had some IBM HDDs in a system at work which were massive and weighed a ton. Each platter was an immense 1M Byte. They regularly crashed and the software boys used the scrap disks as office decoration.

The original consumer HDD were troublesome things too; nothing like the fast, ultra reliable, high capacity types we have now. I read in a science mag that when the research boys sort out molecular memory that capacity will be practically infinite, access will be fast, and retention permanent.

 

[strantor]

I have used Acronis back up in the past but didn't get on with it.

My feeling is that back up facilities lag well behind what is technically possible. I don't know if this is feasible but I imagine an environment where backing up is continuous and automatic and part of the operating system, say with a processor solely dedicated to the task, so that the main processing functions are not hobbled.

**broken link removed**

Charging cells in series is never a good idea and sometimes you can discharge and charge a seemingly dud cell and it will recover. Why they do not charge the cells individually in battery packs, I just can't understand

I thought they do charge the cells individually. Or at least I assumed that. The battery tab on all the laptops I've had, had like 20 little tabs, I assumed which were part of a per-cell charging circuit; or at least a per-cell monitoring circuit.

Hi strantor,
Intresting- feel like explaining how that works. Does the auto backup slow your machine noticeably. Do you back up an image or files. As I said before I don't know much about backing up.

I use Acronis. (see how here, pg 44). The auto backup does not slow me down that I can remember, but I'm usually not using it at the time when it's backing up. I do an incremental image.

Through the years I have noticed some characteristics of engineering types, not just electrical/electronic, cropping up time and time again:

Here, I'll self-identify, and re-weight the list as it applies to me:
(14) Inquisitive
(17) Independent / (18) Self motivated
(16) Inventive
(xx) Practical (function over fashion)
(12) Horder
(xx) Small spectrum of emotion
(4) Migraine
(xx) Quiet, and Odd apparently, to others
(1) Some sleep problems, ALWAYS
(xx) strong willed
(15) Industrious
(3) Digestive problems.
(19) Good sense of humor
(10) Pedantic or perhaps particular is a better word
(11) Think that females (or other people in general) are also logical
(2) Worrier

Not applicable:
(13) Love of animals, especially cats
(3) Hay-fever and general allergies. Alopecia.
(5) Left handed
(6) Dyslexic
(7) Difficult spelling
(8) Uneasy punctuation and grammar
(9) Difficult second languages

 

[spec]

**broken link removed**

I use Acronis. (see how here, pg 44). The auto backup does not slow me down that I can remember, but I'm usually not using it at the time when it's backing up. I do an incremental image.

Thanks for the info strantor. I obviously have some reading to do.

I thought they do charge the cells individually. Or at least I assumed that. The battery tab on all the laptops I've had, had like 20 little tabs, I assumed which were part of a per-cell charging circuit; or at least a per-cell monitoring circuit.

Hmm, I will have to look into that. I must admit that the last time I messed with battery packs from laptops, power tools, vacuum cleaners etc was about 10 years ago and the equipment was even older. Those batteries were charged in series, either 1 stack of four battery cells or two stacks of four in parallel. The latter is more common on laptops now and is known as 4S:2P, if I remember correctly.