Re: One very dead computer

* Christophe Grandsire said on 2002-03-08 23:28:26 +0100
> It seems Boudewijn and Irina have had a big computer accident, and
> they lost a lot of material. Moreover, they seem to be unable to reach
> the list. So here I post for them the mail they wanted to send to the
> list.
Oh, horrible fate! :,( Explains why I haven't been able to visit
valdyas.org lately, I guess.

As for backups, long-term I recommend cds. Cd-burners are dead cheap
nowadays and when you have the finished disks, they are easy and cheap
to *post-mail* away to some safe place like parents, sibs and friends.
With dvd-burners you could backup the software too.

Short-term, an old machine with a huge hard-disk in it. Dump the contents
of the 'work'-machines to this now and then, and power it down and store
it away afterwards (or simply remove the disk and store that).

> Christophe.
I assume you'll be passing on messages, Chr?
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> >From boud@calcifer.valdyas.org Fri Mar  8 14:56:00 2002
> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 14:48:09 +0100 (CET)
> From: Boudewijn Rempt <boud@...>
> To: conlang@listserv.brown.edu
> Subject: One very dead computer
>
> Today the disks have been officially pronounced dead by reputable computer
> repair men,
There are firms that can get data from even the most damaged disks but
of course this costs money - lots of it... I take it this isn't an option?

> and we've orderd two new systems (this was the third computer
> to go in three months). My old laptop is now impersonating Calcifer, our
> server.
Have you checked the quality of the power in the house? Frayed cables?
Maybe something wrong with the grounding. Power-spikes (there are gadgets
to protect you from these at least)? Do check this, might be the house
itself that goes *kaboom* next.

> This means, of course, that a lot of conlang stuff has gone, since we only
> had backups of the novels we were writing, and some essential
> administrative stuff, due to a non-cooperative cd-burner. Specifically:
Oops. A new burner, then. Plextors or Yamahas are gen'rly good.

> * The relay (both of them, in fact.)
> * The archives of the relay list
> * The conlang pages on Skerre
> * The Kura database that contained new Valdyan and Denden words
But you have the software? I've got the source for 1.0 in case it's gone.

> * Megabytes, megabytes and megabytes of email.
Need the conlang-archives (1997->today), headers intact? My conculture-
archives aren't complete I'm afraid.

> So, if someone had a mirror of, especially, the relay
You've checked google's cache and the wayback-machine?
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.valdyas.org

Quite a bit in the latter...

> Boudewijn Rempt
>
> --
> When is the last time _you_ made a complete backup?
Just before christmas. Last one before that was in 1995... on diskettes
and tapes. Need to move that to more modern media... *yerrrgh*


t.