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How *not* to start your day... :(

n4gix

n4gix

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After fixing my coffee and relaxing a bit in my living room watching the news, I got up and strolled into my front office and turned on the monitors of my development computer...

...only to find a Blue Screen of Death. Uh oh!

I rebooted the computer and eventually got the horrible screen advising me to select the boot drive. Oh crap!!! This is not good. o_O:yikes::eek:

My three year old dev computer's 240GB SSD has become a useless chunk of silicon. :tapedshut

Fortunately, several months ago I had cloned that SSD to a new one, so after a few anxious moments had swapped them out and booted up the good 'ole dev machine. Success!

So, the only things actually "lost forever" were all the "cookies" for the dozens of websites I visit, and my archived email from the past few months. Everything else - including programs, program data, etc. - are kept on my D: drive. I haven't tried yet, but I may be able to rescue some of the cookies and archived email by putting the old SSD into my USB docking station.

In any case, I'm going to be ordering a new SSD from Amazon.com today so I can clone a new replacement. It will not however be another SanDisk (the one that failed). :scratchch
 
Hello Fr. Leaming

That's horrible news and I completely know how you feel; loosing all data of your frequently visited websites is also a sad thing. Fortunatelly, your projects are safe and sound. In my end, I've become paranoid about this particular issue and have a small storage space in a file hosting website, 2 SSD for storage only and the "working" hard drive. And yes, from time to time I burned some DVD's with my beloved projects.

Although we know that this eventually will happen, I no longer feel safe with any kind of data storage... I know, paranoia has taken the best of me this days :confused:

Nevertheless, here we are and I wish you the very best for you and your lovely family; needless to say, the same goes for your current projects.

Kindest regards,
Sergio Kauffman.
:)
 
Hi Bill,

I'm sorry for what happened to your SSD. I know how does that feel; losing everything because of storage drive damage too bad. I hope you can get a really good replacement.
In my personal opinion, I can recommend you either a Kingston SSD or an Intel SSD (I heard some good reviews from the latter one, but I don't know how it may perform). I currently use a 240GB Kingston A400 SSD, and let me tell you that it performs so good right now after three months of using it. That's an upgrade I did to my dev computer and I needed it. Although I'm using the SSD for Windows only, its performance is very good.

Regarding source files of projects, luckily you saved them and rescued them. In my case, I save them not only in my HDD but on the cloud (from time to time) too so I can redownload everithing and start again from where I left the last time.

My best wishes and blessings to you and your projects and good luck :)
 
Hello Bill

Cookies - who needs 'em anyway! :D

Paranoia in the development world is a Good Idea. I don't have a backup boot drive (hmm - I do have a spare HDD and that does sound like a Good Idea :rotfl:) but I'm pretty paranoid about data and development. Main dev machine has a separate backup drive and there's also a second backup 'server' that has four separate drives in it, all carrying mirrored data. I have a scattering of SSDs: Samsung, Kingston, Crucial and OCZ, none of which have yet given me trouble and I know the OCZ (1Tb) and one Kingston (540Gb) are four years old by now. I could lose six drives and two machines - nothing's impossible - but I hope I'm on the Vanishingly Small Chance highway.

-Dai
 
It is always good to have actual backups. About 10 years ago I lost one of HDDs in my development system, but I had a backup - well, thats what I thought. It was a backup on a tape, but I was not able to restore it, because the tape was faulty. I lost the work of 3 years, and it was a real nightmare to rebuild all data from my memory. I have learned to better have two backups instead of only one. HDD or SSD - electronis can die very fast.
 
DragonflightDesign said:
Hello Bill

Cookies - who needs 'em anyway! :D
Click to expand...
Dai, people like me who can't remember passwords they only had to make once at any given website, that's who!

Fortunately, over the years I've only had about six password combinations, all of which mix alpha, numeric and special symbols (where allowed), so I "only" have about thirty possible combinations to try... :rotfl:

I thought I'd set up the C: drive to be OS only (which is why I used a 240GB drive. There's no point in wasting space and money! Unfortunately, I did neglect to redirect the cookies and email archives to my D: drive. Otherwise all data is stored on the 1GB hard disk.

All WIP files are actually kept in my local D:\Dropbox folder so it's automatically mirrored to the DB 'cloud' as well as being automatically distributed to all team member's own local DB folders. That's at least nine identical storage locations! I also mirror such critical files to my own NAS device, as well as a weekly backup of both the C and D drives. :coffee:
 
n4gix said:
people like me who can't remember passwords they only had to make once at any given website
Click to expand...
That's very understandable Bill, I fully agree.
You're not alone, I sometimes forget my passwords and when I lose the cookies I always have to request a new pwd :|
That's a good stategy
 
n4gix said:
Dai, people like me who can't remember passwords they only had to make once at any given website, that's who!
Click to expand...

All passwords for accounts on websites that involve monetary transactions (banking, shopping, etc.) are stored in mildly encrypted, non-electronic form.
 
ACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not good... Glad you are back up and running.

I think I had a SanDisc also fail on me, but it was a 64GB chip for phones.
 
My SanDisk SSD is still going strong.

And is it just me or are US based flight simmers posting about hardware failures much more often than simmers from otherwhere?
 
Had the same experience on my EMS drive on my development machine 12 weeks ago........................................ These are attached directly to the mother board. Thought it a great idea when I went to the store for it. Down with the kids - me thinks ---- NOPE! Wrong call - 16 months - high speed load times, great sound great graphics, used part cloud for the rubbish stuff (still don't like big brother) suddenly MS update that failed followed by the pretty blue screen and nice white writing. Contacted computers support - yep drive had passed over to the other side but I can have a new motherboard with drive attached - same cost as the whole old computer plus tax. Strange the agent could not get the mode of decommissioning my old one with my 5LB bricking hammer . Got my "old faithful out", new HD and 2 hours later - nearly back to normal life.

Backing up main development files- I do weekly - on to a nice 256 GB usb that cost me nothing - takes 6 minutes max. No passwords on the machine EVER. "Ye Olde book" still does the job with some 30plus site addresses, access passwords etc.

Monthly - copy over my favorites to the usb - All now a habit really.

But there is something really communal when we all feel the same seeing our/colleague drives passover and the machine go TU :censored:
 
My passwords from just about my teenage years are all safe and duly recorded by my old standby Roboform: https://www.roboform.com/

As for SSD's, there are many cheap ones out there with enticing prices, but I only trust either Intel, or Samsung.
 
My new backup SSD should arrive later today. I'm giving WD Blue a chance this time around.
 
gfxpilot said:
Had the same experience on my EMS drive on my development machine 12 weeks ago...
<snipped for brevity>
But there is something really communal when we all feel the same seeing our/colleague drives passover and the machine go TU :censored:
Click to expand...
I'm not familiar with "EMS drive(s)", but I cannot imagine anything embedded on the motherboard.

My new sim testing machine has slots for this type of "SSD" but I'm not quite ready to jump that shark yet:
BlKYt.png
 
HiFlyer said:
...
As for SSD's, there are many cheap ones out there with enticing prices, but I only trust either Intel, or Samsung.
Click to expand...
Don't let the name lull you into a false sense of security. The one that failed on me was an 18 month old 1Tb Samsung 850 Pro. Their much ballyhooed 10 year warranty wasn't worth much, as they wanted me to send the drive to New Jersey for them to examine.
I hit it with a hammer and replaced it with a Mushkin Triactor.
 
I'm not totally sold in the idea of solid-state drives. I've got several IDE drives that have provided reliable yeoman service for nearly 20 years now, all of which are good 'ole Western Digital. I have had three 1 TB Seagate drives that failed just a week past their warranty.
 
ddawson said:
Don't let the name lull you into a false sense of security. The one that failed on me was an 18 month old 1Tb Samsung 850 Pro. Their much ballyhooed 10 year warranty wasn't worth much, as they wanted me to send the drive to New Jersey for them to examine.
I hit it with a hammer and replaced it with a Mushkin Triactor.
Click to expand...

Aaaaaahaaa! I see the union of computer de-commisioners has yet another member.
 
n4gix said:
I'm not familiar with "EMS drive(s)", but I cannot imagine anything embedded on the motherboard.

My new sim testing machine has slots for this type of "SSD" but I'm not quite ready to jump that shark yet:
BlKYt.png
Click to expand...

Give it to me and I'll jump the hell out of it.



P.S:
Zero hard drive failures in 22 years of computer use.
 
ddawson said:
I hit it with a hammer and replaced it with a Mushkin Triactor.
Click to expand...

Certainly with HDD I subject them to blunt force trauma until I hear bits of platter tinkling inside.
Is that still valid with an SSD? I would have thought a welding machine would be more appropriate. :)
 
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