[PLUG] Failing Notebook Hard Drives and extreme paranoia

Sean Whitney sean at fork.com
Thu Aug 12 13:21:01 UTC 2004


Actually I am fairly paranoid myself.  I usually back everything up to
tape while at home...  I usually do it right before I travel, like last
night.... ARGGGG.....

Sean

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 12:46, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> ENU is indeed a good place to find laptop drives.  I have also seen
> them in some of the Computer Renaissance stores, which are in many
> cities in the western US.
> 
> It is probably too late to help Sean today, but I am ultraparanoid
> about losing laptop availability when going on the road, especially
> if I am giving a paper with it.  So, some tricks:
> 
> 
> Besides the nightly Dirvish equivalent-to-full-image backups that I
> do, I also carry an Ultrabay hard drive holder for my IBM thinkpad,
> with an identical spare 40GB hard drive in it.   Then, at night in
> the motel room, I go into single user, kill noncritical processes,
> and do a:
> 
>    sync ; dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1049576
> 
> Which takes about 2 hours and makes an exact copy of the drive,
> including all the ext3 partitions and swap partitions.   If I lose
> the hard drive the next day, or do an "rm -rf /", I only lose the
> day's work.
> 
> Partition your laptop drives with a few hundred empty MB at the end -
> it is a pain in the tush to try to copy a 40.9G hard drive into a
> different-brand 40.0G hard drive, if you've used all the space. 
> Fortunately, data blocks are data blocks, so you can migrate a
> whole file system to a different drive, if it fits.  Put a second
> swap partition at the end of the drive - those are easy to resize.
> 
> Of course, I also carry a CD and a USB stick with the critical data
> and presentation on it.
> 
> Sean learned (as have I) that laptop hardware will ALWAYS fail the
> day before an important trip.  Of course, that is when you are behind
> schedule and making all those copies of things, so you are pounding
> the keys less gently than usual.
> 
> So, the next (expensive) paranoid option is that my wife has the
> same model of Thinkpad.  "Sweetums, can I borrow your laptop for a
> few days?  Here's the instructions for putting your hard drive back
> into 'your' laptop when it returns from IBM service, and here's the
> jeweler's screwdrivers."  Thank goodness that IBM always manages to
> repair and return laptops within 48 hours.  And the Airborne Express
> folks have Thinkpad shipping boxes on hand, just call for an RMA and
> a box.   Airborne will deliver a box in the AM and return for a pickup
> in the PM, usually.  Sweetums is not deprived of JPilot for long.
> 
> That is way more paranoia than most people can stand, but it works
> for me.   The nightly backups to the spare hard drive are probably
> the easiest (and spare 40G laptop hard drives are $100 these days).
> Thank goodness this isn't windows - no "pretty please, may I, Bill?"
> required to copy a drive.
> 
> 
> As I said in my Dirvish/Rsync presentation, "shit happens".  And as
> long as Satan walks the earth in a thong bikini, shit happens at the
> most inconvenient time.  Plan ahead and have the tools ready for
> recovery, because Satan visits after the computer stores close, and
> she will distract you with more shit while you are trying to recover
> from the previous disaster.  The bitch.  :-\
> 
> Keith
-- 
Sean Whitney <sean at fork.com>





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