Recent Posts

18051

Find And Run Robot / Re: Turn off troubleshooting log

« Last post by mouser on October 23, 2009, 02:46 PM »

i'll add an option to disable this.

18052

Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 23, 2009, 01:28 PM »

Is the HD rack for servers only that requires some advanced tinkering only for power users?

absolutely not -- we are talking about hard drive racks, which as you can see from the newegg links above are about $25.

they require no skill beyond that required to install a new hard drive or cdrom drive in your computer.

instead of hooking up a hard drive, you hook up the rack instead, which is the size of an old larger 5.25 half-height drive (exact size of a cd/dvd drive). then the normal hard drive slides into that.

as Miles points out, the only thing you have to make sure is that you have an open bay in your case -- something that would fit a cd burner.

18053

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SwiftCompare lite: Free file compare and folder synchronization tool.

« Last post by mouser on October 23, 2009, 11:59 AM »

Welcome to the site ankit 

18054

Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 23, 2009, 11:47 AM »

I'm wondering though, since HP insists on putting the standard HD inside this internal cage that's pretty inaccessible, if it's possible to install the HD rack using the unoccupied optical drive bay?

as long as a cable will reach, the optical drive bays are the exact 5.25" size you need for a drive rack.  give it a try.

18055

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SwiftCompare lite: Free file compare and folder synchronization tool.

« Last post by mouser on October 23, 2009, 11:45 AM »

ankit, a reminder: please state your relationship to the software when you post.

18056

Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 22, 2009, 12:32 PM »

Let me add another more subtle tip, do not shoot yourself in the face by doing very frequent backups that always erase your last backup.

You might *think* you are doing a good thing by making very frequent backups, but if you are always overwriting your previous backup with the new one, what you are really doing is asking for trouble.

The problem is that problems don't always show up immediately.

Let's say you make a back up today of your system, and each time you back up you do it by overwriting your previous backup.  So you only have 1 backup of your system, and it's from yesterday.  Then tomorrow you get a virus alert and it turns out you were really infected last week, and it riddled your PC with viruses and wiped out your entire family photo collection, but you didn't notice it until today, when the new virus definitions got released.

Oops.. what do you do now? Your only backup is from yesterday, but yesterday's backup still had the virus on it.  The same problem occurs if it's not a virus but you accidentally delete files or overwrite files and don't realize it for a few days.

SO.. the solution is to create drive images and stagger them instead of overwriting them.  Keep multiple drive images spread out in time.. make a new one after major installs or updates, or once a month, and keep some going back for 6 months or so.  You get the picture.

18057

Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 22, 2009, 11:18 AM »

any reasons you want to give for this mouser?

Well I had to do a hard drive restore not too long ago after a sudden hard drive total crash and failure. Everything went very smoothly, but i felt like i got a bit lucky in terms of having recently made a backup, and kept having visions of the nightmare that would have befallen me had i not made a recent backup or if i had not been prepared for it.

18058

Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 22, 2009, 10:14 AM »

can you recommend one mouser ?  a search for "hard drive rack sata trayless" at NewEgg just gives three iStarUSA products which sound suspiciously like they only available in USA or N.America..

here's a better search link at newegg (for "tray-less" instead of "trayless"):
http://www.newegg.co...less&x=0&y=0

the one i have is the kingwin, but any of those will do.

18059

Living Room / You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by mouser on October 21, 2009, 11:09 PM »

Are you sure that the backup procedure you use will save you when (not if) the time comes that you need it?
I thought I would start a thread about how to test it and make sure it will.

First let's set the ground rules:

• This thread is about whole-system (entire hard drive) backup and restore, not about backing up only your personal documents.
• As I described in my old backup guide, I firmly believe that the best approach involves both periodic whole-system backup combined with more frequent and incremental (preserving multiple versions) personal document backup, but this thread is about testing your full-system recovery procedure.
• This discussion is about *testing* your backup procedure -- not about actually using the software and hardware to do a backup in the first place.

Ok, so let's get started:

Step 1: Make an image of your drive, onto another spare hard drive

• I'm going to assume you already know how to make a backup of your (main) computer hard drive.  But you may not -- many (most?) people use a backup procedure that just stores backups of certain important files.  If not, for the procedure I'm describing, you are going to need a full Drive Imaging tool, like Acronis True Image, or the nice and free Drive Image XML, or Paragon Drive Image, something similar (see this thread or this thread for more discussion).
• When you make an image of one drive, that big image file has to be saved to another drive.  That's where one of those external usb drives comes in so handy -- so get yourself an external USB drive for storing your backups.

Step 2: Wait you mean there's a step 2??

• Ok now if you're like most people who make a backup of their hard drive, there is no step 2.  If the backup program runs successfully you assume that your computer is backed up and that you could restore it if something bad happened.
• But the ugly truth is that many people have had the terrifying experience of experiencing a real hard drive crash and finding that they could not restore their backed up drive image, for a variety of reasons.  You don't want to go through this -- trust me.
• The solution of course is to safely test your restoration procedure.  [As an aside I will note that some imaging tools like Acronis True Image now has a function that lets you virtually "mount" a drive backup, which can go a long way to validating it and making sure you can access the files -- but it's still no comparison to a real restoration test].
• So how do we simulate the catastrophe of a hard drive crash? Simple, take the working drive out of your PC.  There you go, you are now in the same situation you would be in if you had a full hard drive crash.  This happens in the real world.  Expect it to happen to you one day.
• Drives are dirt cheap these days -- go down to the store or to your favorite internet shop, and buy yourself a spare hard drive.
• Now you're going to put this hard drive into your computer, and you are going to restore from the backed up image onto the new hard drive, which should restore it's state completely.
• What's that? You didn't create a standalone bootable cd for your drive imaging software, and so now you don't know how you are going to restore the backup? That's why you're testing this restoration procedure, so you learn all of these things you have to do.
• Figure out whatever steps you need to take to get the new hard drive restored with your backup image.  Boot with it, make sure everything works and all the files are there.
• Once you verify it works, you can remove that drive and put it someplace safe, and put back your original (or put your original on the shelf and use this one).  Congratulations, you have now tested your emergency restoration procedure.

Step 3: Improving your system
There are several things you can do to make it a little easier to test your emergency procedures.

• One is to install a hard drive rack inside your computer, which will let you swap hard drives from your case with just the turn of a latch.  I love hard drive racks and the new sata racks are completely trayless and as easy as can be to use.  Really ideal for such testing.
• Another alternative to a bootable restoration cd is to use a drive CLONING procedure instead of a drive IMAGING procedure, to directly make a copy of your hard drive onto another drive, which can be swaped in directly in an emergency, without needing to ever perform an image file restoration.  The downside to this is that you can usually fit several compressed image files on a backup drive so they use a lot less space.  The upside is you only need one spare hard drive (the drive you are going to clone onto), wheras with the imaging procedure, you typically need 3, your main drive, a drive to store your backup images onto, and then the drive you are going to restore onto.  Cloning your hard drive is actually in many ways a simpler and more straightforward approach that you may prefer, especially with the cheap price of hard drives.
• TAKE YOUR TIME! Label your hard drives, be insanely careful about when you restore onto -- the last thing you want to do is wipe out your original hard disk while trying to test your recovery procedure.  I like to keep my good hard drives way far away from me so there's no chance of making such a mistake.
• Don't even think about restoring back onto your main hard drive.. ever.  You should always, when testing or restoring after a catastrophe, restore onto a spare hard drive.  Only after you know for sure your restored system works well can you even entertain the possibility of reusing your original drive (assuming it wasn't a hardware failure that prompted the need to restore your backup.  Until then you want to treat the original hard drive as a precious object not to be messed with, and you do not want to risk the restoration process failing and wiping out remnants of your original drive).

Hope that's of some use -- and please do get into the habit of regularly backing up your hard drive.  

18060

Adventures of Baby Cody / Re: Baby Cody with Ampa... and time to move on.

« Last post by mouser on October 21, 2009, 09:00 PM »

I'd like to see the map posted somewhere too - I don't mind keeping it up to date if hosts let me know their location.

-Carol Haynes (October 19, 2009, 10:43 AM)

Carol, perfect solution, see this thread: https://www.donation....msg181879#msg181879

18061

Adventures of Baby Cody / A Map of where Baby Cody Visits?

« Last post by mouser on October 21, 2009, 08:59 PM »

It just occured to me that the new project that DC member Veign just released (Plarker) would be perfect to keep track of all the places Baby Cody has visited, wouldn't it (see this thread for more Plarker discussion)?

18062

Living Room / Re: Reporting myself to a moderator

« Last post by mouser on October 21, 2009, 03:49 AM »

agree -- ill remove the block.

18063

Living Room / Re: RAM & Virtualisation

« Last post by mouser on October 21, 2009, 01:27 AM »

yeah, basically with a 32bit OS, you will not be able to access any extra memory, period.

18064

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Monitor a folder and send shortcuts to desktop

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 04:49 PM »

and here's the thread that led to Skrommel's ShortCutter, from 2006:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6419.0

Skrommel does it again!

18065

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Node type to launch one dock from another?

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 12:34 PM »

bug reports and feature requests are always welcome 

18066

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Monitor a folder and send shortcuts to desktop

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 12:33 PM »

hey this is actually a pretty good idea!

18067

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Node type to launch one dock from another?

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 11:53 AM »

benefits of having the names of all tabs visible at once

point taken -- i agree that's a useful thing.  let me give it some thought.

18068

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Node type to launch one dock from another?

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 11:43 AM »

Check out the setting for a menu node that lets you treat it as a "tab page":
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=18752.0



It's not the most intuitive thing, but basically it can be used to switch whole sets of buttons displayed on a dock -- useful for changing between operating modes.  It's not exactly the most intuitive thing, and i would like to set up something a bit more tab-looking, but it does do some of what you are asking for, and a nice thing is that it's very easy to navigate like a normal menu if you like.

18069

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Node type to launch one dock from another?

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 10:54 AM »

what would it mean to "launch" another dock? can you give me an example of how you'd like to use this feature?

18070

Developer's Corner / Re: JayIsGames.com - Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6 Opens - 10/4/09 deadline

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 08:59 AM »

Full Moon (rabbit game by by Bart Bonte) was really sweet and great. 

18071

Developer's Corner / Re: JayIsGames.com - Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6 Opens - 10/4/09 deadline

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 08:35 AM »

You can now play all of the entries to the JayIsGames Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6!

http://jayisgames.com/cgdc6/

18072

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: A free laptop mouse replacement software.

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 03:15 AM »

nice to meet you, welcome to the site 

18073

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: A free laptop mouse replacement software.

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 12:59 AM »

i've removed the download link as i think it would be better for people to download it directly from the site.
are you the programmer?

18074

DC Member Programs and Projects / MOVED: A free laptop mouse replacement software.

« Last post by mouser on October 20, 2009, 12:58 AM »

This topic has been moved to Announce Your Software/Service/Product.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=20308.0

18075

UrlSnooper / Re: URL Snooper unclickable after a few seconds

« Last post by mouser on October 19, 2009, 06:21 PM »

that is really strange i've never heard of that before.. if you look down in the status bar, does it say it's sniffing packets and show them counting up?