Posts Tagged ‘backup’

Restoring windows while retaining user files

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

I’ve been doing so many things at once this weekend. Besides organizing and backing up a ton of computers, writing software, and learning how to get a media server setup, I’ve also been playing PC Doctor.

As my wife was starting to work with her new computer, her old one unexpectedly stopped working. The computer would take a long time to go from the boot menu to the progress bar, and then reboot. I took a look at it myself and noticed that the windows logo startup showed for a brief moment followed by a blip of a blue screen of death (BSD/BSoD). The computer did not have a floppy drive, so I couldn’t run a scandisk through a dos boot disk. I quickly searched for the ultimate boot cd and downloaded a copy. Surprisingly, Microsoft Vista doesn’t have a way to burn ISO images to CD or DVD. I downloaded and installed the ISO Recorder software.

I went through a lengthy check on the hard disk and found a little over 100 bad sectors. A few popped up before the progress bar reached 1%, and I just had that feeling that those were system files. The system files are often at the beginning of the disk for quicker access. They are often the first thing installed on a disk as well, so the chances increase that they would be near the beginning. The diagnostic utility hung at the start after finding four errors. I had to reboot and run it again, and then catch it just after the 4th error and tell it to repair itself. I ran the diagnostic again and it got past the blocks that it was hanging on. None of the other errors had this problem.

After all was said and done, the operating system seemed to boot much quicker. Rather then taking 10 minutes to load up and crash, I was crashing in less than one. This pretty much led me down the path to restoring the system. Fortunately the computer had a restore feature that retained all user documents while reinstalling the operating system. It’s not the OS that my wife is used to. It’s more of a factory default ugly looking thing without personality. However, she may be able to get into it and access her old files again to transfer them to her new PC.

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Memory Transfer

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Last week, I got a network storage system (NAS200). I have since set it up to be RAID 1 with mirroring. During the setup process, it asked if I wanted to enable journaling as well. I had no idea what journaling is and had to look it up. Apparently, journaling lets you do atomic transactions with file writing. If the power goes out or something happens in the middle of a transfer (or deleting a file), you are safe. The file does not fully transfer/delete. This is good because if you have partial data on a disk and the disk is only … partially aware of it, it could end up being overwritten, or simply not show up and not be available for writing over either. Naturally I turned it on.

Backing Up

I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files on a lot of computers. I’ve been using DiskPie 2 and Sequoia View. Both are free programs, however DiskPie 3 (Pro) does cost a few dollars if you want to go with the latest program. The programs help me visually identify large files on my file system, as well as large directories and file types. Each has their own strengths allowing me to trim many gigabytes from my HDD’s.

After trimming the fat and organizing files, I then face the long backup process. I use a tool that I created for retrieving files from my old 250 GB HDD. It appears that it comes in handing going the other way too. Any time that the program fails, I simply restart it again. It recognizes files that were already transferred and skips over them. Really handy!

Problems Encountered

So the problems I’ve been running into are few. Wireless networks are also pretty slow. However, I use what I have to get the job done. Wireless networks appear to “forget” they are connected to a network. They seem to drop off every now and then. This results in me having to restart the copy process to ensure that all files are transferred. My little tool tells me when their is a problem such as a network path not being found. One computer kept knocking itself off so often that I had to continuously monitor it and check up on it every 15 to 30 minutes. Another computer wouldn’t stay connected at all and I had to physically migrate the thing near my router to connect over the LAN.

Old computers take a lot of time to use the other utilities (DiskPie/Sequoia). One of the older computers only had a 75 GB drive, and at the time of purchase, that was considered excessive. The majority of the drive is full of MP3’s that I ripped from most of my music collection. The tricky part of this is that collection has migrated over to my other computers that I backed up, so I have a lot of duplicate music. That music is mixed in with “protected” music as well, so I hadn’t tried separating the protected music from the original music. In addition, the original music has since been converted to AAC format to take up less space. On top of that, the newer AAC format has additional information such as ratings, completed information about each track, artist album, and album artwork. It took a lot of time to get all of that setup.

Eventually I’ll have to find the duplicated music and consolidate them into one complete library. For now, I’m making separate folders on the NAS to identify what computer that each backup came from.

Some computers contain backups of other computers. These are not simply just “My Documents” and “Desktop” files. I used software programs (such as Norton Ghost) to do full backups of hard drives. Although the computers are no longer operational, I need to find a file reader for those old backups and see if their is anything worth saving.

I’m only halfway through all of this. I’ve backed up seven computers (3 are virtual/non-existing). I have 3 more computers to backup. I then need to reorganize and consolidate those backups. I’ll also need to wipe out the old computers and set them up for “my master plan”.

Master Plan

I primarily want to setup a development environment. I would like to setup the following services: email, MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, PHP, ASP.Net + Remoting on a second tier, and SVN. Many of the services could be consolidated to run on the same machine. Perhaps all of them. In addition, I would also like to have a dedicated server for OpenSIM.

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