(above: me sinking my teeth into a 10,000 RPM Raptor Hard Drive)This will go down in the history books as ASA Photographics worst week of computing EVER...at least we hope!!
So we come back from Labor Day weekend to find my computer on the blue screen of death.
After a day and a half of trouble shooting, it looks as if one of my hard drives crashed (I have multiple drives in my CPU). Now this would have been all fine and good if the hard drives were set up in a “RAID 1” configuration (where one mirrors the other). Then I could just boot and run off of the secondary drive. This is the way I thought I had set it up when I bought it and is the way I wanted it set up. No, no, no, it was set-up in a “RAID 0” configuration (in short, loose one, loose them both--why would anyone do this? you ask? Well, it is called "Striping" and it is a performance enhancing set-up, not a back-up system.) Won’t ever make that mistake again. We work extensively on our back-up procedures, so we have not lost any client data, (I repeat-WE HAVE NOT LOST ANY CLIENT DATA) but to replace my drives and start from scratch again is a time consuming and stressfull process.
Again, this will be the first and last time "Raid Zero" happens in our office.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, we start transferring work load onto Gail’s system and guess what…VIRUS TIME! Virus time like I have never seen it before. Her system is completely hosed!
We have been on the phone with our tech for days as he is in Florida.
It is now Friday night and we have turned our dining room into a temporary office with our two old laptops. Our desks where our workstations are looks more like a funeral parlor.
We had so much we needed to tackle this week. Among other things, we wanted to pump out a couple of prints to enter at the PPANE (Professional Photographers of New England) convention in Nashua this weekend. That dream died along with our systems this week.
Right now my system is being restored from a drive image I took a little over a month ago. This will put everything (software, e-mail, and all) back the way it was.
This is the EZ-Gig software that I wrote about on our “Photog’s Blog”. See that…I practice what I preach! That will save us a lot of time and aggrevation. God knows we don’t need any more this week!
Other than that the only thing that is making me feel better is this…
A NICE BIG CHOCOLATE MARTINI
Gail hooked me up. It is Friday night after all = ).
2 comments:
Oh man -- I soooo feel your pain! (and wish I was feeling that Chocolate martini) - I desperately need a better back up system...nothing has crashed yet but I am working off 4 drives that aren't redundant...I feel like I'm walking a tightrope without a net!
So happy you were able to recover everything.
Here I logged onto your blog to see if you posted anything about the PPANE competition (did you guys enter?). If you competed...would love to hear the results!
Man, I never expect to get comments so I never look for them. SO SORRY!
YOU NEED TO BACK THAT INFO ASAP!!
YOU ARE ASKING FOR MORE TROUBLE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE.
Call me seriously! I can give you several directions to move in.
No, we never got our ducks in a row enough to enter anything. We may try and "prequalify" some more work at PPAM in February.
We are lining up another training at the studio that I think you are going to like. You will here about it once we lock it down.
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