21 hours and counting...

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury) 08/30/2017 at 15:45 • Filed to: None

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Last step of the data recovery process. I’ve already restored the apps and the user directory, so even if I quit right now I have the important stuff; many critical documents are in the cloud, but not all of them. I would like to have the OS configured as it was before the drive trouble started, hence this last restoration pass. Sure, I’ll do an OS reinstall after this is all done, and it should be as it was.

I’ve learned my lesson. Backup, backup, backup. After years in corporate IT in the aerospace industry I should know better, but what can I say - I’m a cheapskate and was always running out of disc space. Now that I have more drives than I can count I shall reconsider my previous attitude towards backing up my home computer...

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 08/30/2017 at 16:04

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Back in the day, I bought Retrospect and a tape drive to do it. I really like Time Machine for its ease of use, especially with how cheap drives are nowadays. I just wish Apple would update it. It’s getting pretty long in the tooth.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Chariotoflove 08/30/2017 at 16:24

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I never had the greatest luck doing tape backup at home, never really being able to recover what I needed when I needed it. In corporate IT it was a little better, but still not foolproof. I now have piles of 500GB drives, mostly pulled out of DirecTV DVRs, that I should be able to set up a backup rotation with just pieces and parts here on my desk. I’ll probably order some of those drive trays that allow you to easily pull drives for this project, or perhaps re-purpose some servers I have piled up in the basement.

On the subject of fools and tape backups, I remember a NOC (network operations center) operator coming to me with a request for some new file cabinets to hold the backup report logs because they were running out of space to hold these piles of printouts (c’mon people - double sided printouts, OK? 99.729% of these reports will never be examined, so can we kill fewer trees, please?). We rotated out the tapes every week and had a set for every month, so the oldest backup we had available would be no more than a year old. I grabbed a report from 18 or so months prior and asked him to tell me exactly which tape I should pull to restore some random files listed on that report. He thought about it for a minute, opened his mouth to speak like he had the answer, then turned around and walked away. Request denied...

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 08/30/2017 at 16:42

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Love that story. Even people that know they should backup, still may not know how it works or what it really does.

I did tape backup for the research lab as a grad student, as the only guy who took it upon himself to learn about computers. I had to restore from tape a couple times. It’s an annoyance, but not half the annoyance it would be if I didn’t have the backup. We are required to backup our research computers by University regulation and for NIH (read: federal) compliance. Still, many of my colleagues don’t. I’ve seen people have HD crashes on their old Dells and then scurry around their emails and thumb drives trying to reconstruct precious data.

These days, I just have a 4TB drive hooked up to the network for scheduled Time Machine backup. Makes life easy. I’ve scavenged older drives before, but they’re usually not big enough for today’s capacities, and I eventually run out of room. That’s why I just bit the bullet for a new drive. My time is worth something, ya know? I use the old drives for miscellaneous storage.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Chariotoflove 08/30/2017 at 17:19

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The file restoration is underway, although I have no clue how long it will take. It looks like I’ll have a working system in just a few hours. The next task will be to reformat that drive and give it at least a 24 hour stress test to see if it can be trusted again. I tend to leave my primary machine on for extended periods of time, so I intentionally selected a hard drive meant for 24/7 use in a DVR for longevity purposes. It may not be the fastest thing around, but that’s not important. For speed I had a RAID0 array, but that suffered a drive failure and now that data is history. I’ve been meaning to check it out for the last few years, and one of these days I’ll get around to it. Regardless of which drive I’m talking about, uncorrected B-Tree problems are no laughing matter.

Disc space sure has gotten unbelievably affordable in just the last few years. As I write this I have two external drives, new in the box, sitting around waiting to be used. There’s a 6TB and a 3TB unit, and the total cost for both was about $165. I use the various piles of 320 and 500GB drives like we used to use floppies in the past - insert it, put some data on it and then put it on a shelf for later retrieval. No real worry about failure if it’s not up and running, right? When I bought my first PC it had an 80MB drive in it, and I quickly ran out of space and installed a whopping 200MB drive, thus beginning my seemingly endless issues with data storage. Oh, and in high school we had a fancy Corvus setup with a shared 5MB drive.

When I moved I had several 5 and 10 MB drives that I wasn’t going to do anything with. These were heavy 5.25" full-height drives, and I really didn’t feel like carrying them downstairs to the dumpster (this was way before e-waste really became an issue). Rather than carry them, a friend and I had a hard drive shotput contest off the balcony. Obviously the rules were not well defined, other than just going for distance, so I guess I won the competition despite one of my drives hitting a tree and knocking off a limb. Oops. Yeah, those suckers were heavy...

I’ve got a bunch of good stories from my time in the IT world that still make me laugh/cringe 20+ years later. My favorite involves a move from one facility to another. Everyone was given a scale drawing of their new office and their furniture. They arranged it the way they wanted it, and thus the movers could configure their office correctly the first time around.

The person that handled the archive of all of our documentation and reports previously had a rather large space with tons of file cabinets, but her new office was going to be a bit smaller, and as such, she couldn’t find a way to get the same number of file cabinets to fit in her new office as comfortably as they were arranged in her old office. But she didn’t let this minor little issue get in her way, and came up with a brilliant solution; well, brilliant in her mind at least. She just took the scale drawings of the furniture to the copier, reduced them by several percent, and lo and behold, everything now fit in her new office...

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 08/30/2017 at 17:38

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She just took the scale drawings of the furniture to the copier, reduced them by several percent, and lo and behold, everything now fit in her new office...

You’re lying. You must be lying. Please tell me you made that up. No one can be that stupid, right?

Geeze, I remember my first years in college with Macs that had to boot up from a floppy, and a Commodore that ran everything off 5.25 inch floppies. We had an amazing amount of fun with those dinky machines. Remember how much even the smallest hard storage cost? Good times.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Chariotoflove 08/30/2017 at 18:25

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That is a true and honest story, I swear. The person that did this was one of the strangest people I had ever met, mostly from an appearance standpoint but also for her odd outlook on life and rather spacey nature. You can pretty much guess what most of the employees at a defense contractor look and dress like; pretty conservative with a slight hint of geek. She was a different story entirely.

It was hard to tell her actual age because she was a serious chain smoker with the corresponding deeeep, gravelly voice from a 2+ pack per day habit that stretched back nearly half a century, I’d guess. She was also quite tan, but all of that tanning 30 or 40 years prior meant that she was seriously leatherfaced and wrinkled now. Skinny as a rail, with dyed platinum blond hair starkly contrasting with her skin. She also dressed like a 20-something that was about to go out clubbing on a Saturday night, quite awkward for someone of her, umm, advanced years. How she didn’t fall off those ridiculously high heels I’ll never understand, especially considering her penchant for drinking at lunch. She also had a rather thick eastern European accent, Romanian I believe. And she would drown herself in massive quantities of rather inexpensive, cheap-smelling perfume, in an effort to cover up the stench.

You could always count on her for saying something bizarre and off-the-wall, making you stand back with a wrinkled brow trying to figure out what the hell she meant. Staff meetings were always entertaining, with people attempting to keep a straight face whenever she would bring up one of her convoluted, non-sensical issues. And you would always want to get to the meetings early and find a seat with others on either side of you so that you didn’t have to sit next to her; the cigarette stench would waft over to you and saturate your clothing, and you’d be stuck with the smell until you went home. Febreze wasn’t a common thing back then, so you had to live with the scent all day. One guy couldn’t stand it and went to his locker and just put on his gym clothes for the rest of the day. The boss called him on it, saying he wasn’t dressed appropriately for work, but all he had to do was mention her name and the subject was immediately dropped.

I remember hanging out at Radio Shack when the first TRS-80 computers came out. We didn’t have a computer at home until I bought a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981, doing every odd job in the neighborhood to come up with my half of the $300 purchase price (my folks agreed to match me dollar for dollar). I had an original C2N datasette, like we used in 8th grade on the PETs and CBMs. I was one of the first of my social group to get a floppy drive and was the envy of all. It was susceptible to going out of alignment if jostled, and so after a few times taking it over to friend’s houses, despite careful packing, I stopped doing that. I can still remember the location of the technician that would realign my drive.

I think I recently stumbled across the special punch used to put a notch on the other side of the 5.25" disks so that you could write to the back side as well. At $5 per floppy you were determined to get your money’s worth out of those things. I still had my VIC and an early Commodore 64 in 2012, but gave them away when I moved. There were several other treasures in my computer collection, including a couple of original IBM PCs. Not XTs, but the very first PC. So original it even had a port for a cassette deck if you couldn’t afford to buy one of those fancy 160kb diskette drives.

I still have a few vintage pieces around here, including a clock made out of an S-100 buss interface card of some sort and a massive circuit board from a minicomputer that is about 18 inches square and packed with ICs. There were probably half a dozen of those in the machine, but I just kept one for decoration. And I still have an original Wico joystick with DB9 connector. I don’t have a Commodore to use it with (I just emulate the old machines these days, part of the reason I keep an install of Snow Leopard on an external drive; I purchased a killer C64 emulator called Power64 that isn’t compatible with newer versions of OS X), but I can still use it with the Atari 2600. Those original Atari joysticks were flimsy pieces of crap, frequently breaking and difficult to repair, whereas the Wico is still kicking ass 35 years on. I’ve even used it on some other electronic projects since the wiring, with it’s five momentary switches, is pretty simple to work with.

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 08/30/2017 at 18:53

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I know that type of person; I can see her in my head. Now I believe you.

You’re bringing up memories of the Trash-80s they used for programming classes in my high school. The first computer I ever used was a PET with a cassette deck on it in the library. I learned how to write enough basic to make a little icon dog walk across the screen. I thought it was so cool at the time.

The word processing program we used on my room mate’s Commodore in college was a pirated copy on a 5.25" floppy that was made double sided by cutting that notch. No fancy punch for us. We used scissors. The program wouldn’t save well and would crash. So, whenever one of us was working on a term paper and needed a break, we would turn off the monitor to prevent burn-in (those color Commodore monitors were great; we could hook a VCR up to it and have movie night in the dorm room) and put up the sign that said to not turn off the computer. We would breath a sigh of relief when we could print it out to turn in. He also had scores of pirated games for the Commodore that he brought back from being an exchange student in Germany.

I have hardly any old hardware or peripherals anymore (remember SyQuest EZ135 disks?). We purged several years ago. All I have left is a 17" Apple Cinema Display that I’d like to sell or give away to someone who wants it. I’m tempted to get an emulator like you (I have a Snow Leopard machine at home) to play old arcade games, but I’m afraid I’d waste all my life playing them.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Chariotoflove 08/30/2017 at 19:42

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I was a big EZ135 user back in the day. And would you believe it? I just saw one of those drives in a bin at the Goodwill Outlet this past Monday! I have the shell of an original Syquest drive that I keep around for filling up empty 5.25 bays in desktop computers. I had fun tearing it apart and looking at the engineering that went into it. One of my favorite parts was a glass tube with a rubber plunger in it that acted as some sort of shock absorber-type thingy for gently slowing the motion of an assembly. I probably still have it around somewhere.

One of my favorite geek projects was gutting an old 3.5" hard drive and installing a small USB hub with a few microSD cards. people didn’t know what to think when I’d pull it out of my briefcase and plug it in, somehow thinking the software was actually running from a hard drive connected by one simple little USB cable.

The Goodwill Outlet has been a blessing and a curse. I find something interesting, like a better router, and I buy it. The next week I find a better router and buy it. This cheap but vicious upgrade cycle continues until for some time, and I end up with some pretty decent (if a little older) equipment for very little money. The downside is that I have a bunch of lesser stuff I need to get rid of. I’m currently using a nice Asus AC1900 router, complete with USB2 and USB3 ports and lots of antennas, but I have a storage container of lesser ones that I now need to get rid of. If I try to give them away people get greedy and want everything, even if they have no plans to use them. I don’t want to charge market prices, so perhaps I’ll do like the guy that sold me the $10 24" monitor did, and sell them for a token amount.

Same problem with headphones. I started out buying some Sony models, finding some Sony professional units, some Turtle Beach gaming setups, and recently some noise-cancelling Bose units. Incremental steps up (or kinda sideways when it comes to the Bose - the noise cancelling is great, but the sound quality is just a little above average). Now I’ve got a bin full that need to find better homes.

I had a problem with another thrift store that had $0.50 (formerly $0.25 or 5/$1.00) sales on Sunday mornings. I bought a lot of stuff just because it was cheap, not because I had any plan to use it. I really didn’t need an extra toaster oven, but it was 20 cents. Same thing for the dehumidifier (currently running in the basement) or the espresso maker(s). I grabbed a bunch of various LCD monitors, and now I have way more than I will ever use. I still have this massive water-cooled HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 case that I need to get rid of. It too was only 50 cents, so it was hard to say no. I’ve actually been downsizing my computers, putting them in smaller cases, so this Voodoo really doesn’t fit in with my current plans.

I loved those old Commodore monitors. I kept mine until 2012, and like you mentioned, used it as a TV for ages. There are still a few CRTs around my house, including a 21" Sun Microsystems 1600x1200 monitor that nearly gave me a hernia when I moved it a few weeks ago. There is a CRT TV in the living room (a room I don’t use much) that I bought as a replacement for the $100 55" HDTV that I used to have. Another Goodwill find, that beast was made in Germany and cost something like $9400 when new. But the color wheel broke and it wasn’t cost-effective to repair it so I bought that widescreen CRT (with HDMI, no less) for $5. And I think there’s a 9" CRT TV upstairs; another $5 purchase, I replaced it with a 50 cent LCD TV I found on one of those Sunday mornings. My favorite CRT monitor had to be the single page Apple B&W portrait monitor.

I even had a 20" dual page monitor connected to an SE/30. A conductor I used to work for gave me the SE/30, which still had a ton of value at the time, but held on to the monitor. I just went down to a surplus place and grabbed another monitor for $50 (this was the ‘90s, don’t forget). I have no idea what he did with the monitor he kept as it really wouldn’t have been good for much else.

I haven’t played a lot of games on that emulator, but there is one that I keep going back to all these years later - M.U.L.E. It’s still one of the best games ever written, at least according to various gaming magazines, and I still enjoy the hell out of it. The rest of my family really weren’t into computer games like I was. Dad owned a computer consulting firm, and to him computers were really about work and not fun. But there were a few items that got the family together behind a screen: Amok and Radar Rat Race on the VIC-20, and SimCity and M.U.L.E. on the C64. At 71 mom is still a bit of a gamer, and I think I’ll install Abzu on her computer when I go back to California for a visit next week. They travel the world going on snorkeling/diving trips, so I figure this will be right up her alley:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks have a few games on their iPads/iPhones, but nothing terribly serious. And me? I have more Steam games than I will probably ever try thanks to sites like Humble Bundle and Bundlestars and similar places, mostly because they were such a deal (Just a dollar for a dozen games? Sure, sign me up...)

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 08/31/2017 at 16:35

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The problem I found with the EZ135 disks is that, eventually, many of them would start to have trouble spinning up or spinning down. Initially, I used them as backup for our Performas, but by the time we moved up to iMacs, I mostly used then as super floppies. And eventually, I just chucked them, along with my SCSI cables. It’s tough throwing out things you once spent so much money on, ya know?

We were a CRT household until this Spring, for TVs that it. I finally got us a flat screen. It didn’t seem necessary to throw out a perfectly good CRT while it was working fine. Then, I couldn’t give it away. Now it’s smart TVs. People still use CRTs for gaming consoles, but even publication houses, which need to control color profiles, seem to have gone LCD.

I may need to start checking out thrift stores though. The danger is I’ll do what you do and start accumulating stuff. I just don’t have the space. But I love my wife’s Bose head phones. If I could score something like that for cheap, that would be special.

I have versions of Joust and Galaga on my phone. That’s all I let myself play anymore. Back in the day, I loved UltimaIV, Wing Commander, and then Doom. I also had Myst and Riven. I think maybe I’ll start a retro gaming thread. I think we have plenty of Oppos that would go for that.