Sigh, damned windoze again

[altivo]

Gary called me at work this evening in an absolute panic. He was sure his hard drive had crashed and he'd lost everything. Now, I know that alone doesn't mean he has lost everything, because he's absolutely anal retentive about making backups. He has two external drives that he backs up to, and keeps one of them at his mom's house in case ours is destroyed, switching them every week or two. At the worst, he should have lost whatever he has done since the last backup, which would have been on Friday.

There are, of course, many other possible causes when Windows (XP Pro SP3 in this case) suddenly does a blue screen and then insists it can't find the bootable partition on the hard drive. He insists on trusting Bill Gates though so he did what most users will do. He reset the computer, and when it came up it found the partition all right. Unfortunately, it also found "errors" on it and started scandisk, which promptly trashed the file system by relinking and deleting stuff with abandon. After doing that for some time, then it couldn't find enough of the OS left to run from. God only knows what it trashed, or whether any of his data is still recoverable.

What's worse is, on the advice of the "experts" he bought his system from, it has two 150 GB drives configured together in RAID 0 as a single 300 GB. Given his paranoia about losing data, they should have been running in tandem as shadow drives instead. This configuration probably means that if one of the drives has in fact had a physical crash, the other's data is no longer salvageable except perhaps by an expensive expert service.

All I could do over the phone is tell him not to do anything more that would write to the drives, and let me bring home recovery tools on CD (of which I do have some) so we could look at and assess the damage. Fortunately for me, he then called another of our friends who is much better at Windows than I am and who agreed to look at it for him on Friday. Since he goes to his mom's tomorrow anyway, and would be away from the machine most of the day, that's not such a big delay. He'll probably have to replace at least one drive, and restore the OS from his installation CDs. Whether he can get back any of the data is doubtful now, but he should be able to get back to Friday's versions.

I'm going to have to think seriously about building a network file server with a RAID 5 configuration to take care of this issue once and for all. He gets so stressed about these things that it ties MY stomach in knots. Getting him off Windows and into an environment (Mac or Linux, I don't care) that doesn't have Microsoft's knotty and disastrous registry involved just isn't going to happen. His classes start on Monday again, and of course the school is absolutely sold out to commercial Windows products to the point that students can't survive in his department if they are running any other OS.

Comments

[delphinios.livejournal.com]

From experience, RAID 5 isn't a great solution. It's better then nothing, but has its own severe limitations. It makes it easy to recover from a physical crash (to a point) but anything else (filesystem corruption, for a common example; a failed RAID card or corrupted array due to bad data written to the array) will destroy the data just as easily as if it were on a single drive, if not easier.

I've long advocated a Disk Span Array (single mapped drive letter that addresses a dynamic disk spanned across multiple drives - makes for easy and less risky upgrades over time with about the same risk of data loss as a RAID 5 array) and regular *true* (second copy) backup. It's only a little bit more work, but a thousand times more safe.

[delphinios.livejournal.com]

An excellent option I've seen, is buying one of the 1-1.5tb NAS devices, that have a Backup-to-USB device feature (where once a day it incrementally backs up the main disk to an external USB HDD. That's so much better protection. *nods*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

See comment to Avon below for why I don't like proprietary backup tools. If they run independently of the device being backed up, they just backup the corrupted data. Even if the backup is good, trying to restore from it often turns into a nightmare of huge proportions.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

RAID 5 has worked well for me, especially in combination with a UNIX style journaled file system. NTFS is definitely not my favorite file system. In this particular case, it's hard to say until the analysis comes in on what actually happened. If it was Windows memory corruption causing data corruption on the drive, then yeah, no RAID configuration would have saved him (but neither would your DSA.) If it was a hardware crash in the disk drive, though, a simple shadow drive (RAID 1) would have done the trick.

His proprietary backup system is cumbersome and he has never restored much of anything from it, so he's understandably freaked now over whether it is going to work to get things back even to the last backup (and worried because that backup is five days old.)

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

What about a mac or linux laptop/desktop with a windows virtual machine? Easy to backup, easy to restore, easy to get rid of when you're done with the trash.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's what I do when I absolutely can't avoid dealing with a windows only application. Getting Gary to switch though is like trying to relocate an immovable object.

It's also true that his school makes this difficult. They insist on requiring some of the very worst, most piggish applications. Just as they insist on web-based distribution of information and assignments, using the worst bandwidth-hogging formats such as Flash. They're utter boobs in my opinion.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

I am totally enamored of Apple's Time Machine. I wish there was an equivalent I could use on my Windows machines at work. All I have to do is make sure the backup drive is plugged into the computer, and it's backed up every hour. In fact, I keep two backup drives and switch off between them.

I need to sit down with my kids and show them how to save their word processing and presentation documents in Windows formats in iWork too. Really no need to be stuck on Windows. At the very least, he could run Windows XP in virtualization and save the files on the Mac side of things and Time Machine would back 'em up.

It's possible to get free of Windows. Would you believe I don't run Microsoft Office at all at work?

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

It's no help under Windows, but, for Linux, rsnapshot is functionally quite similar to TIme Machine. It can also back up remote machines, which is a neat bonus.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm considering that or something similar, and it CAN help with Windows, since what needs to be backed up here is primarily the data files. Reinstalling Windows and applications is a pain, but can be done. Recreating the databases and spreadsheets, though, is almost impossible.

By using Samba shares and an rsync-based backup to a Linux server, we should give him better security. He can keep doing what he has been doing, and the backup will be transparent to him until/unless it is needed. I know he can exercise the discipline to keep all his data in the proper directories, as he already does that for backup reasons.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sure. I haven't run MS Office at work for years. Remember, I have Linux running on all the public workstations there, as well as my own. Most users never realize it isn't Windoze. One staff workstation (besides my own) has been running Linux for two years as well, and people have been using it without any special difficulties. Trying to shake the remaining ones out of Windoze though is like telling them they have to learn Chinese. It isn't happening because I don't have the patience to argue with them.

They are addicted to garbage apps like Publisher and resist learning anything new the way a housecat resists being taken for a walk on a leash.

The trouble with remote backup applications that run automatically is that they have a good chance of backing up corruption just as easily as they can back up good data. They also tend to eat bandwidth and CPU cycles somewhere in the network. I also prefer to avoid Apple solutions because they are even more proprietary and non-portable than Microsoft stuff. When they work, sure, they're pretty good. When they don't, you're up shit creek without a paddle.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

See, I'm pretty much a skeptic about ultimate backup solutions too. I didn't use Time Machine for quite some time, preferring to clone my disks instead. So jumping into Time Machine wasn't a leap of blind faith.

See, even if it backs up corruption, I've got 45 backups to choose from, hourly for the last day, and weekly back to March (which on this disk is when I started). The backups are done in the style of rsync hard link backups, so the disk just has a pile of folders. It's rather like running Dirvish on Linux.

It doesn't normally take very long to back up because Time Machine leverages the filesystem event and indexing mechanism of the operating system. It only copies the files that have changed, hard linking the rest from a previous backup. Many backups finish in seconds. You'd hardly know it was there.

And the paddle is: The backups are just copies of the drive. Though Apple has the cool celestial browser, it's possible to just go onto the disk and look at the files and copy them. /Volumes/Eunostos/Backups.backupdb/Xoots/2009-08-20-080636/Xoots/ is a total copy of my boot drive, from 20 minutes or so ago. Any backup can also be used to totally restore the computer, or migrate to a new machine.

Even if you didn't have a Mac any more, the backups are just folders on an HFS+ drive, an open, documented filesystem format readable by Linux.

But hey, I only brought it up because you mentioned Mac as a possibility, and this feature of OS X has treated me very very well.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The rsync approach is what I'm looking at, but probably with a Linux based tool.

I mentioned Mac because if I don't, someone will jump all over me about how I'm just another "Linux nerd." But in the case of the library or my home systems, cost-cutting is a very important factor and when you run the numbers, Apple just costs too much to consider.

Besides, I have to make it work and maintain it. Linux, Unix, VMS I know pretty well. My Mac knowledge runs thin way back at version 6.x, which I hated with a passion. (Yes, I know, that's before they switched to the BSD kernel and all that.)

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

> [RAID0] probably means that if one of the drives has in fact had a physical crash, the other's data is no longer salvageable except perhaps by an expensive expert service.

Correction: "…if one of the drives has in fact had a physical crash, the data is unrecoverable." RAID0 doesn't deserve the name, as it lacks "R" (-edundancy).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Pretty much what I had figured. Thanks for confirming it.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

What's the point of a RAID0? I guess if you only have 4GB disks or something?

I have two disks, and I think my registry hive (Hive? That's apparently what it's called) collapsed, which wiped out Windows. I had pretty much everything, except for some Application Data, on the second drive, so I just had to reinstall Windows on the first and it was good as new.

Actually, I hadn't intended to reinstall Windows. I was led to believe there would be a disk checker on that DVD, so I popped it in, and it automatically formatted the hard-drive in preparation for installing Windows. So it's kind of a good thing I had everything on the second disk.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

What you say here "doesn't compute" at all. If you lost the registry, you lost all the installation data for everything. Reinstalling Windows should have left you with a working system but no applications.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

I forgot, but I had to reinstall all my programs, except for the ones that don't need to be installed.
A lot of the programs I use are simpler, like Textpad or Paint Shop Pro 6, which work without needing to use the registry (though they use it to store window positions and such).

What I'm saying, though, is that no data was lost. All my music, videos, game ROMs, backups, and the cache of install files I keep were all still there on the second disk.

[kyhwana.livejournal.com]

RAID0 is about speed.
We have 3U's boxes at work. We can write ~1.3GB/s write to disk/arrays in RAID0.

But if one of those 16 disks dies, everything on the array is GONE.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

That reminds me. I need to get a backup solution sorted myself. He does right making them at least.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Making backups is good or at least harmless. Not knowing how to restore them, though, renders the entire operation pointless.

Because his backup system relies on proprietary backup software, he can only restore to a system capable of running that software (i.e., Windows XP) and if he has trouble with it, nothing else can read the backed up data. The backup drives may be perfectly intact, but if the application is wonky, the data is inaccessible.

I was faced with such a situation years ago when I inherited a network that was set up by someone else (overpaid outside consultants, as it happened.) A crucial server was lost (stolen during a physical move by incompetent movers) and though I had backups of the entire system on DAT tapes, I couldn't restore them because the idiotic backup application was "secure". It would only restore to the same physical device the backup had been taken from. The software vendor was no help. They just said there was nothing that could be done. I managed to fool it in the end, but only with the faculty of an entire college jumping on me continuously for two weeks until it was resolved. That backup application went into the trash and I swore never to use a proprietary backup tool again. Of course, I once again inherited one where I am now, and have been trying to get rid of it for seven years.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Poor Gary,
Microsoft is not a bad beast really XP is very good for standard home computing, at least in my experience. Gary's backup system sounds good, he could always consider a NAS.

I don't trust drives in the same machine, if the power supply goes it can take both drives in the machine. You can now get these e-sata docks where you just drop a bare hard drive in.

I use Acronis backup to clone my drive to another and I have another drive for quick access backups and also burn to DVD.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I have seen far more problems with Windows junk than in everything else I've worked with in a career dating back to 1972. Mainframes, minis, micros, and a dozen operating systems, and none of them have had the reliability problems that Windows has. I think it all comes down to the fact that Windows and Windows applications simply don't respect or protect memory boundaries well enough. One wild program with a bad address pointer (something for which C programs are notorious) can trash a critical bit of RAM and down comes the whole deck of cards. Depending on how the cards fall, wild data writes to the disk drives seem to ensue, with this sort of consequence.

Windows has never dealt effectively with memory shortages, and doesn't seem to have ever gotten the idea of memory protection to work properly.

[kyhwana.livejournal.com]

er no..
Half his data is going to be on the failed drive, depending on the stripe size.

Sooo, his data is GONE.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This assumes that one drive is really toast, rather than just partially corrupted. I do agree that RAID 0 was an inappropriate choice, but since I'm one of those "Linux people" he didn't ask me for advice when he bought the system and set it up.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

RAID0 seems a bit silly, considering the speed boost-up is barely noticeable, and the risk of data corruption is more than doubled. It might work well enough if it would contain just the OS and temporary work files, and there would be daily incremental backups made to another disk. Sounds even sillier, I think. =)

It's kinda annoying that there's no reliable tools for backups in Windows. Even something like dd from unix world would help, at least you could grab an image of the drive and move it some place safe.

For proprietary tools, I'm trying how Acronis True Image would work for my brother's machines. After the last bout of spyware, I'd rather avoid having to reinstall Windows the fourth time just because someone has a habit of attracting 'net worms. Both of the machines were happily sending spam too, those darn kids!
Making a drive image to a hidden partition will probably be enough, unless the hard drive itself dies. Though I could make copies of the backup to an external, but I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble.

More about proprietariness, Acronis seems to support zip-format for their backup files. And it can also run from a bootable CD, if there's no access to the OS anymore. It also got some instance of itself somewhere in between that, pressing F11 before Windows loads it to some linux-like environment, dunno where it's hiding though.
As long as the backup itself is in a safe place, I'd think the data itself would be accessible. Software makers are slowly catching up, methinks.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I will be looking for an open source backup solution that can work with one %^*&$^ Windows machine on the network. After repeated problems with support and maintenance of commercial products that cost hundreds of dollars, I'm done with handing money to any corporation for second rate software.

Microsoft is, of course, the worst of all the vendors I've had to deal with in the last 35 years. They are the ones who made me jump through hoops for about six weeks to diagnose something, which turned out to be exactly what I told them it was from the first day, and then they said "OK, we have a problem. We won't be fixing it." The problem was registry corruption in Windows NT on machines with a certain common hardware configuration. I'm sure my installation wasn't the only one to be bit by it. They never acknowledged it publicly, but interestingly enough, Intel quit manufacturing that particular CPU that year.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Microsoft is getting better, operation-wise, I have to admit that much. But technology still keeps evolving faster than the poor coders trying to keep it all together. Well, at least it'll keep tech people busy and employed.

The sad part is that software tech support is usually pretty unsupportive. When there's things wonky with the system, it's usually something that can't be conveyed through a telephone call. And the support side wouldn't have any clue about it anyways, unless it's a common bug. And for those, there's Google. =)

For the free stuff, Cobian Backup had pretty much everything I needed, but for some reason it didn't like my network shares, which have always been a bit odd. Of course, if there's ample time, a bit of scripting and windows port for rsync would do wonders...

Off-topic question, i admit...

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

When a person refers to having "lost everything", it assumes they had something in their possession to lose. In relation to your thing about having/not having control over things, what would Gary have "lost"?

Re: Off-topic question, i admit...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

His data records. He keeps all his accounting data, including historic data on his retirement funds, all his appointments and schedules, and all his addressbook and contact information on the computer.

He also had several years worth of old e-mail, but I know from experience that he won't miss much of that if it's gone.

He uses Access databases extensively (another big liability in my opinion) and will not be happy if everything that was in those (medical records for the animals, farm accounting and financials, gardening information, a huge amount of musical information related to his performing groups) gets lost.

Re: Off-topic question, i admit...

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Hmm... no offense to Gary, but aside from some hassle of having to add figures, it hardly seems like a loss at all. Seeing as how you've known him awhile, can you give any insight into what thoughts he would have that would lead to such a "freakout"?

Re: Off-topic question, i admit...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You obviously don't appreciate the size of the data loss. It's not just balancing a checkbook here. It's tax records for the last ten years, maintenance records for all the equipment on the farm, medical information...

He doesn't trust his own memory, and relied on the computer to keep all of this. The volume of it is huge, and even I wouldn't be able to recall it all, even though I'm known for a phenomenal memory. The impact on him is about equivalent to someone having their house burn down, destroying everything in it, including cash, photos of family, etc. I realize that your lifestyle is radically different and this doesn't seem like a lot to you, but to him it's a major disaster.

Re: Off-topic question, i admit...

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

I realize that your lifestyle is radically different and this doesn't seem like a lot to you, but to him it's a major disaster.

That's not to say I've never suffered loss, though. The reason I live such a radically different life is, in fact, partially due to the tremendous losses I used to think I'd suffered. I chose not to put myself through that any more. The only way to do that is to change one's thinking, because thoughts motivate the feelings of loss.

You equate it to a house burning down- which comes from your frame of reference- so what would losing your "cash, photos of family, etc." if you and he made it out okay?

Re: Off-topic question, i admit...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This doesn't seem like a fruitful discussion any more.

It matters to him, a lot. He matters to me, a lot, so I care.

End of topic.

Re:the end.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

You end nothing just by saying "end it here.", but since I've nothing more to gain from prodding, I shall cease & desist. It does not, however, speak very highly of one's character... which could be said for either of us, I suppose... *shrugs & walks away quietly into shadows*

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

Short of making a hackintosh, I would highly reccomend Gary get a Mac Mini. you get quite a lot of bang for the buck for those tiny machines.

I'm seriously considering getting one to replace my old G5 powermac.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No go on that. We can't afford Apple, and in any case, the crap software he has to run for school requires a pretty heavy duty Windows machine with gobs of RAM and disk. He also has thousands of hours invested in Access databases and the associated scripts, forms, etc. The best I can hope for is an independent backup that doesn't require Windows and keeps multiple versions of stuff up to some preset limit.

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll admit Apples are more expensive, though the Mini is priced at $599.
It can also have Windoze installed and be dual boot since they are Intel boxes now ^_^

Nonetheless, used Apples can be found reasonably too.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Trouble is, as long as he's running Windoze software on Windoze, he's still got the same problems. The presence of another OS on the drive doesn't help a bit and just takes up space, because he won't use it.

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

*nods and hugs*