Jolt Country

I was working on my new computer, which, because I have lots of data files on my previous computer, I have both plugged in and the old one runs headless. By having them networked I can use SMB (Windows networking) to share files from one computer to another, I can basically use my previous computer as a file server.

I have two external hard drives, one which is a 250 GB and the other is a 1 TB. The 250 is about 1/2 full as I moved my music collection over to it because the 160 GB drive in my old main computer was running low on space.

A few weeks ago, while moving things around, El Stupido (yours truly) moves his computer without removing the external hard drives, which were sitting on top. They both slide off and fall on the floor, about 2-3 feet. But it was enough.

They don't work anymore. I plug them in, one makes noise and the other just clicks. I wasn't really using the terabyte drive, but my entire music collection was on the 250GB. Did I have a backup? Well, yes and no; I had an older backup on DVD but that was in the folder that got lost when I was evicted. El Stupido didn't have a backup and kept the drive where it could get damaged if he wasn't careful.

I have no idea how many files I lost; I originally estimated my entire music collection, probably 3,000 mp3s, WAVs, and OGGs, maybe 40 GB of files. I have to revise this; I ran a duplicate file finder about a month ago; I dropped 12,000 duplicate files so I have to presume I lost more like 15,000 files.

As the drive is essentially suffering from physical damage, it would have to be fixed in a recovery facility, probably by disassembling in a clean room. Cost: about $1100.00.

I had deleted the current files off my other computer because I needed the space. I have - or I hope I have - some of the original files on my other computer in the closet.

I can't believe I was this stupid. You know, it's funny; it's pointed out that the typical value of a hard drive is only a fraction of the value of the data. Or the cost of the recovery if lost.

All I can say is, make sure you have a backup, or that you have two. A 1 terabyte USB hard drive used to be about $100; if you look carefully you can now find 2 terabyte drives for that. If you don't need that much space, external USB hard drive prices are as low as 10c per gigabyte, which makes hard drive and DVD pricing close, with DVDs at 4c/GB, the only problem being DVDs being small compared to the tremendous amounts of data we typically have around. Small discs have an advantage that they are easier to store than hard drives, so that can be solved with larger discs. Blu-Ray burners can be gotten for about $120 or so; 25GB Blu-Ray discs sell for about $20 in 10-pack spindles.

Like Jacob Morley in "A Christmas Carol" I carry a ponderous chain of lost data, and I can only offer my example in a hope that you will not repeat it. "Otherwise you cannot hope to escape my fate."

As a result of the prior incident I've had to do something I hate: spend money "in anger". I have to spend money to fix something, usually because of error or negligence.

I bought a 2TB Seagate drive for $89.00. It was internal, only i didn't look at the box; it's not a PATA with a 40-pin connector, it's a SATA drive. I was unaware there is a difference, the connector is not the same. But I take a look. As luck would have it, my new computer does use a SATA drive, even the DVD writer is SATA.

It only has capacity for two connectors, so I hook up both hard drives (amusingly enough the old drive is also Seagate). There does not appear to be a jumper for master or slave, so I suspect the system is "cable select" for master, and hooking the blank drive to the connector for the DVD mounts them correctly as master and the new drive as slave.

I try a drive clone utility I've downloaded but there's a block with an error, the program crashes. There is a backup/clone program on the CD included with the drive. Only I'd have to shut down, remove the new drive, hook up the DVD, install the backup program then shutdown, remove the DVD and reinstall the new drive.

But I have cut myself some slack. Last year I bought a USB DVD burner; this will be my first chance to use it since I bought it about 9 months ago. So I did, it works and I am able to install. The backup program reboots the machine, then runs under a strange mode of XP.

So anyway, the existing drive has two partitions, a 4.9 GB unnamed recovery partition and the 72 GB main NTFS C:\ partition. Well, it will let me resize the 72GB to take up majority of the new drive and use the 1.99 trillion byte partition, but it does partitions by percentages, so the 4.9 becomes a 122 GB partition.

I don't want to waste more than 110 GB so I need to wait until it finishes and try again. This program notices the error and asks if I want to retry or ignore. I tell it to ignore it and one other bad block error and it finishes and reboots. It looks perfect but I want that 100GB back so I run the program again.

This time I tell the program to only use 6 GB for the recovery partition; a single gigabyte I can stand wasting.

So everything copies again and I watch it reboot. The only difference is the C drive now says it has 1.8 terabytes free instead of 22GB free.

This should keep me with enough free space for a couple of months. :) Plus this drive has a 5-year warranty; if it fails before 2016 (as opposed to me dropping it) they give me a new one. I'm not worried about data, I will have backups on that.

I couldn't find an inexpensive Blu-Ray burner - the store is either sold out or they can't figure out where they are - so for the immediate future - the next month or so - I'll jiust copy files from my old computer to this one via the network; I'm not going to back up about another 40 GB+ of files on my old computer via DVD.

But I got a really great deal on blank Blu-Ray disks from Buy.Com, 2 15-disk spindles for 28.95 and free shipping. So I'm getting 30 Blu-Ray disks for under $1 each. That makes them the same price as DVD, about 4c/GB.

So probably next month I'll get a Blu-Ray burner, if it's internal I'll buy a USB connector.

If it were me, I'd just buy a second 2TB drive and either run RAID1 (a mirror that you would never have to worry about messing with), or set up a scheduled nightly backup to copy files from one drive to the other. You could either install it internally, or externally as a USB device.

The cheapest blu-ray burners on TigerDirect are $69 for the drives, and the have 15 packs of blu-ray discs (25 gig) for $30. That right there is around the same price as a new 2TB drive, and with a second hard drive the backups will run themselves, instead of you having to change out discs continually, plus continually buying more media.

I will say that getting jobs to run nightly on Windows is a goddamn pain in the ass. It wasn't until I started having cron jobs at work on Unix/Linux where I finally understood why people hate Windows so much.

Hell, I can't even get Cygwin to run cron jobs IN Cygwin, and I am willing to keep Cygwin loaded at all times.

I read something the other day that made me get a 16 GB flash drive. All the source art files for my upcoming graphical text adventure came to 6GB. Now, I keep the source *code* in three places. (Actually... home PC, a flash drive, another PC and then a repository off my Dreamhost web host, using Subversion.) So I'm OK there. But I definitely didn't want to lose the source photos I took. My friend the Milker has run a haunted house for each of the last 3 or 4 years, and I would go photograph it, so I would have backdrops and environments for my game. It would be horrible to lose those.

Anyway, the drive showed up today. I'm gonna move files over.

(I had no idea terbyte drives were so cheap. I gotta get me one of those.)

My backups are all batch files using robocopy command line copies. I typically do /MIR which mirrors the destination with the source, so if I rename a bunch of MP3s or move things around on my main drive, the destination/backup just magically looks like that too the next day.

It's hard for me to give backup advice to normal people because (A) I am not normal people and (B) I have been dealing with government data for so long that I have a backup scheme at home that resembles what I do at work. In fact, while talking with a friend of mine who runs his own hosting facility, he told me that my backups are better than most of his customers'.

One thing I adopted from work is, don't store your data on your client. If you have one machine, or two machines, then yeah, this doesn't apply to you. I have (counting in my head) at least six or seven physical machines that get used around here, plus another three or four virtual ones. Backing up that many clients is just crazy. Instead, I build a hell of a file server, and moved all of my data there. Then, I back the shit out of that thing up. For starters, the server's sitting on an 8TB RAID5, which means if I physically lose a hard drive ... nothing happens. (Technically it's a RAID6, which is a RAID5 with a hot spare.) The most important thing to me data-wise are my digital pictures, so those get backed up to two different machines every night. I have an additional 2TB drive that I use like a backup cartridge. A lot of my other files, like my "home" directory and things like that get backed up automatically, and then things like mp3s and whatnot get backed up manually.

A friend of mine is using crashplan.com and backblaze.com for backups. Both give you unlimited space for $5/month. One thing my backups wouldn't currently survive is a house fire, so having things offsite (TEH CLOUDZ) would be nice. I think I mentioned this before, but I had a system where I was backing up files wirelessly to a machine out in the arcade. That would most likely survive a fire, but not a tornado. You can get to the point where you drive yourself crazy with this stuff.

Whoa, this Robocopy comes free with Windows, lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

One of Microsoft's many problems is that they don't get the word out for the good stuff they do.

The mirror option seems to be exactly what I want. I could leave my 16GB flash drive plugged into my computer, and Robocopy could mirror a folder with it, I assume.

Now to see how to schedule nightly jobs on Windows 7....

I forgot how much easier it is to find things in Windows 7, now that we can bypass the horrible folder structure of Windows and just type in "Task Scheduler."

So, I created a batch file. Its contents are:

robocopy F:\Text Game Art L:\Text Game Art /MIR
robocopy C:\games\text\czk L:\games\text\czk /MIR

And this is just what I wanted. I didn't want the program to copy over all 6GB of source art each night. It's mirroring that directory, and only doing stuff if there are changes.

The one downside is that I don't know how reliable it will be for the flash drive to be the L:. I think I have Daemon Tools running at the moment with a virtual DVD-ROM. When I reboot, the drive letter will probably change.

If I leave the Flash Drive in my computer permanently, as I plan on doing, this doesn't help me when it comes to someone stealing the PC. But this is better than what I had a week ago. It's a good first step.

(I could probably map a drive to a writable directly remote computer, and have robocopy back stuff up there, as well. Hmm. I have to find a secret place for a computer in my house. Flack, I like the idea you floated on the Gas Chamber about having a remote PC wirelessly connected in your arcade.)

It worked, hooooray!

Commander, although your data may be gone forever, you have helped others learn from your unfortunate situation. Thank you.

So yeah, that's pretty much my backup system.

I have what I call master batch files, and sub-batch-files.

For example, here are two of my "sub-batch-files":

home.bat:

robocopy d:\Home f:\Home /mir /r:3 /w:1

mp3.bat:

robocopy d:\mp3 f:\mp3 /mir /r:3 /w:1

Then I have a master batch file called "1TB_Backup_1":

call home.bat
call mp3.bat

The reason I do that is so if I rename a directory or change a drive letter or something, I only have to change it in one place, instead of hunting through all my backups. It's more of an enterprise approach and you can probably get away with just using a couple of dedicated batch files.

Also, note the switches I use with robocopy:

/r:x denotes the amount of retries. I set it to 3 because the default is one million (I am not kidding). So if your network connection drops or something it will literally retry a million times before moving to the next file. I do backups so frequently that I just try three times and move on. I'll get it tomorrow night.

/w:x is how long it waits between retries. I set it to one second, but the default is 30. This is basically for WAN copies, where in 30 seconds, something might go down and come back up. I'm doing local backups in my house, so if it's down, it's down.

Keep in mind with /MIR is that you will always mirror the destination to the source ... so if you delete the source and run the batch file, it will delete the destination as well.

If you have access to an FTP site, check out Fling FTP. I used to use that and it works great too. Basically you set up backup jobs and it FTP's them to a remote site for you. As long as the program is running, it handles the scheduling for you. For a 6 gig directory, I'm sure you could find a service or a friend that would let you back that up regularly and remotely. My problem is, my home directory is (just checked) 697 gig with 256,236 files. That's far past the "I need a favor" FTP limit.

Also, I looked up the one my friend is using: crashplan.com. $5/month per machine, unlimited space. It's not free, and I like free, but it's remote if you need that.

Flack wrote:If it were me, I'd just buy a second 2TB drive and either run RAID1 (a mirror that you would never have to worry about messing with), or set up a scheduled nightly backup to copy files from one drive to the other. You could either install it internally, or externally as a USB device.

I haven't found any good automatic backup software that is free and does the job simply. I like AMANDA but the server is only available for Linux. So I think I'd still be stuck with having to back up stuff manually.

Further, it's part of the same "all your eggs in one basket" situation that got me in trouble in the first place.

Flack wrote:The cheapest blu-ray burners on TigerDirect are $69 for the drives

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

Flack wrote:and the have 15 packs of blu-ray discs (25 gig) for $30.

No, I got two 15-disc spindles for less than $29. A very good deal.

Flack wrote: That right there is around the same price as a new 2TB drive, and with a second hard drive the backups will run themselves, instead of you having to change out discs continually, plus continually buying more media.

I want my files backed up to disc so that I can have them outside of the computer, for the reason you run backups, so that your backup media is someplace other than in the computer. With files backed up on disc, I can also take them someplace else if I want to make a copy someplace else. Or I can mail a copy to someone else.

I mean, if I was, say, system administrator of a network, I'd be taking backups of our files and either putting them on external hard drives, or, more likely, backing them up on Blu-Ray disks and sending either the drive or the disc to Iron Mountain (a salt mine company in Pennsylvania that rents long term storage in a natural humidity and temperature stable environment, plus the salt keeps bugs away.)

If you have backup copies on disc, you can file them in a binder and put it away in a piece of furniture or a closet; if you drop it, chances are it won't matter. Drop a hard drive and you're in the situation I was in.

Plus it's much cheaper for file backup, I can back up 45 GB on two discs I can mail anywhere for about $6 including postage.

There's another reason, by getting a Blu-Ray drive I get my toes wet with what is right now bleeding edge technology, and I have the capacity to watch a Blu-Ray disc, an extra benefit I don't get with another hard drive.

Beyond which, the 2TB was really overkill for me, I could have bought 1 TB and it would have been far more than enough. I am, however, thinking about doing more video, and that eats a lot of space, and to make sure that's properly backed up I'd be better off with Blu-Ray.

I can back up everything from my old computer (120GB of the 160GB) on 4 BD disks, so the cost to me is about $4, and I can put the discs away in a binder and still the data is online and even a massive power surge destroying every piece of equipment here leaves me with a complete copy unaffected by power surges.

I mean, I see the point and if I strictly went by net costs, running two drives as pure mirrors might be a good idea, but I still think having backups which are not on-line is a good safety measure.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I read something the other day that made me get a 16 GB flash drive.

I have one of those, I think I still have some of my music on it. Wish I had saved more there. But I think the cost of hard drives have dropped so much that a 1 TB is about the price of a 16GB jump drive these days. I checked; Amazon sells them for $30. A 1TB is around $70, and amazingly enough the next 1TB only cost me $20 more. I know what it was; when I purchased a 16GB jump drive a year or so ago it was around $69.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:(Actually... home PC, a flash drive, another PC and then a repository off my Dreamhost web host, using Subversion.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to set up an external Subversion host, I have one internal on the same computer for the files in my book, but I still want to figure out how on an external system. There's at least one free Subversion service available I could use to back up my files for my project but I can't figure out how to get it to work.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:(I had no idea terbyte drives were so cheap. I gotta get me one of those.)

Yeah, if you look carefully you can get 1TB as low as $59. With a 2TB Seagate with 5 year warranty for $89, it makes a lot more sense to spend the extra $30 and get twice as much space.

Some people think it's sleazy the way memory manufacturers call 1 GB 1024^3, but disk space manufacturers call 1 GB 1000^3 (and thus 1 TB is 1000^4) but I disagree for one simple reason: hard drive manufacturers have always transparently said so, and didn't try to hide it. Always clearly declared on the packages.

Flack wrote:The cheapest blu-ray burners on TigerDirect are $69 for the drives

Uh, Flack, you have to read the description very carefully. Those are BD-ROM, i.e, a Blu-Ray reader. They can write DVDs but can only read Blu-Ray. There's a confusing one for $79 which you have to read the specs carefully to understand it does not write BD disks, it only reads Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray writers are around $120 to $130. But I found one listed in the specs that does support writing BD disks, it's $109.

Flack wrote:My backups are all batch files using robocopy command line copies.

Robocopy isn't part of XP, it apparently is available on Vista and 7. There is a freeware program ("Autobackup") to do automatic copies of files that change each day from one place to another, so I could just use the drive on my old computer, but have it back them up to duplicate space on the new computer by running the backup on the old computer as the equivalent of a cron job. Then backup files from the new computer on Blu-Ray and CD or DVD depending on frequency. I had to back up all my files related to the books I'm writing, since it was only about 400 meg, I backed it up on a CD. No sense wasting a DVD for that little.

Semantics aside, what it really boils down to is: how important is your data, how much do you want to spend (in time and money) backing it up, and what kind of disaster are you trying to protect your data from?

Before we talk about my backups, or your backups, let me tell you about the backups I/we perform at work.

Daily (constantly, actually) we perform DDT (disk-to-disk-to-tape) backups. That means all of our servers get backed up to a giant collection of hard drives, which are then backed up at that point (instead of from the servers) to tape. This allows us to quickly restore files for users from disk rather than have to search catalogs of tapes to find a specific file. We also do it this way because, since we back up so many servers locally, that we literally could not finish our daily backups within a 24 hour period.

Our data center is connected to a second data center in the building next to ours via fiber. All of our critical servers are virital, and all of them are duplicated across the street and our users never know exactly which server they are hitting. Should my building explode, none of our external customers would notice as all network traffic would simply be routed across the street.

Additionally, all of our data gets replicated in real time "somewhere else in the country" with about a four hour lag. That means that if an F5 tornado hit our data center ... wait, that's a bad example. Our data center is in a basement that was designed as a nuclear fallout shelter during the cold war. If an F5 tornado leveled my building, we (the "celler dwellers") might not even hear it. But let's say an atomic bomb exploded and wiped Oklahoma off the map. Co-workers of mine could bring our entire infrastructure back online with four-hour old data, halfway across the country.

In addition to all of this, we have a disaster recovery binder that includes DVD copies of all of our software, license keys, and instructions on how to recreate our entire infrastructure from scratch. There are three duplicate copies of that binder: one is in a fireproof safe in our data center, one is at Iron Mountain (yeah, I know who they are; I have a swipe card in my wallet) and one is at our disaster recovery site. Our tape backups get rotated out through Iron Mountain as well on a weekly basis. Old ones sit in one of our safes.

The reason we have such a robust backup system (besides the obvious) is that we are required to maintain copies of all of our data for at least 7 years, and some of it for 30 years.

Now my guess is, you have neither the funding nor the desire nor the need to perform backups like that.

The first thing you need to determine is, are you trying to protect yourself from file deletion, hardware loss/failure, or both? Those are two different things that require different backup approaches. For example, to protect yourself against accidentally deleting files, you need many days/weeks/months worth of backups, and you need access to them. It's tough to recover a file you deleted tonight and created last week when your last blu-ray backup was performed a month ago. To protect against hardware failure, you need two current copies of your data. And to protect against loss of hardware (fire, theft, etc) you need that second copy to be located offsite.

So if you want to protect yourself against everything, you need both local backups, and offsite backups. And you need a system to keep them current -- typically, that means automation.

Burning a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc takes anywhere from 15 to 180 minutes, depending on the speed of your burner. I don't know about you, but I've got better things to do than sit around burning discs all week. Hard drive backups can be scheduled and automated. And don't kid yourself, there are dozens of free Windows-based backup solutions out there.

I can't dispute that disc-based backups are probably more resiliant than hard drives if you go around dropping them.On the other hand, no one really knows what the life span of a blu-ray disk really is. I have 25-year-old C64 floppy disks and hard drives from the mid-90s that are still working, and yet I have store bought audio CDs that have bit rot and no longer work. For a semi-long term solution, hard drives are better than burned discs. For real long term solutions, tape is better than hard drives.

And in the long run, disc-based backups will never be cheaper than hard drive-based backups, because you can reuse the hard drive again and again. Do enough backups, and the cost of the discs will exceed the cost of any hard drive. If you're just talking about making a single copy of some files and mailing them to someone else, well yeah, that's pretty cheap, although I am willing to bet I can buy a 45 gig hard drive cheaper than you can buy a blu-ray burner and 2 discs.

For your books, you should set up Dropbox. You can get a 2GB completely free. It appears as a folder on your desktop, so you could either copy (or just store) your files there. You can access the folder from any machine that has Dropbox installed, so you could work on your book anywhere (the library, a friend's house, etc). It's only 2GB, but it's free. If you need more space, you can expand it up to 100GB -- or, you can look into that Crashplan.com site, which is $5/month for unlimited space.

Also, you are right -- robocopy is not a part of XP. It came with Windows NT 4.0 and has been available for download ever since then. There's also a front end you can download and install if you find the command line syntax confusing, although note that the old version (the NT one) and the new Vista/7 version are slightly different.

Tdarcos wrote:

Flack wrote:If it were me, I'd just buy a second 2TB drive and either run RAID1 (a mirror that you would never have to worry about messing with), or set up a scheduled nightly backup to copy files from one drive to the other. You could either install it internally, or externally as a USB device.

I haven't found any good automatic backup software that is free and does the job simply. I like AMANDA but the server is only available for Linux. So I think I'd still be stuck with having to back up stuff manually.

Bacula is cross platform and free.

Not particularly simple, because it's a real backup program, but still.

Bruce

Semantics aside, what it really boils down to is: how important is your data, how much do you want to spend (in time and money) backing it up, and what kind of disaster are you trying to protect your data from?

"That's a good question, because data is very over-rated, and data is very under-rated. " -- Denver Sports Talk Radio

Daily (constantly, actually) we perform DDT (disk-to-disk-to-tape) backups.

What is the appeal of tape in 2011? I honestly don't know, this isn't me being smug. This isn't me being the obnoxious Internet cretin that posts like this, like this - Flack, Flack, are you watching? Like this:

"Tape? What is tape?"

GYysdnNSDHs I hate that guy. So that's not me. Is tape considered more reliable than hard disk space, at the cost of speed? I seek knowledge.

Also - I think I bought a pack of shitty CD-RWs at Best Buy. I've noticed errors on two audio discs that I have burned, and twice now I haven't been able to get Ubuntu burned to CD. I just want to run some fucking Ubuntu.

Also, you are right -- robocopy is not a part of XP. It came with Windows NT 4.0 and has been available for download ever since then. There's also a front end you can download and install if you find the command line syntax confusing, although note that the old version (the NT one) and the new Vista/7 version are slightly different.

I installed robocopy on one of my XP machines. So it's pretty easy to get going - if you have any troubles, Commander, please let us know in this thread. We are learning things in this thread and it is GOOD.

We run LTO-4 tapes and were planning on upgrading to LTO-5 later this year, although now that the federal budget has been slashed like a Freddy Krueger victim, I'm guessing we'll be running 4 for a bit longer. LTO-4 tapes hold 800 gig each (uncompressed) and cost $25 each. Average lifespan of a tape is 30 years so they'll last way longer than any disc-based media, and they're a bit more resilient to being stored (and dropped) than a hard drive.

(LTO-5 tapes, by the way, hold 1.6 tb per tape and are even faster than the 4 series.)

They're slow to back up on and slower to restore from, but as far as long term data storage goes, they're still the best solution.

As for CD-Rs, I think they are getting cheaper and shittier all the time. I burn audio CDs at the slowest speed and I still get jitters and pops from time to time. The best brand of CD-R of all time (IMHO) were Verbatim Blues, man I loved those things.

bruce wrote:Bacula is cross platform and free.

As is Blackula.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Also - I think I bought a pack of shitty CD-RWs at Best Buy.

I've never had too much trouble, I burn stuff and the test confirms it worked. I buy my disks at Staples or Micro Center or if they have a rare sale, Radio Shack. Like CVS in the drug business, RatShack is almost always the high-price leader.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: I've noticed errors on two audio discs that I have burned, and twice now I haven't been able to get Ubuntu burned to CD. I just want to run some fucking Ubuntu.

I found out my new machine is actually a 64-bit machine (I'm running 32-Bit Windows XP Professional with a COA for refurbished machines, so it is legal). So I decided to try it. I burned a copy of Ubuntu 10.10 Live CD 64-bit.

I am absolutely amazed at how far they've come. Not only that, for Internet connectivity I have an el cheapo $9 Tenda USB 802-11n chewing-gum sized adapter. I am writing this from Windows XP and the adapter works just fine after the driver was installed.

I booted up using the 64-bit live CD and once it started, I tried Firefox. It comes right up, figures out which network to connect to (I'm the only one running unsecured, everyone else around us requires a password) and went to Google. Not only that, X-Windows sized my monitor to the highest resolution the video card supported, and had a nice background image.

I did not have to set or tweak anything to get Linux and X-Windows and Wireless Internet to work "out of the box." The only problem, of course, was that since it was building a setup and running off a CD it was much slower, it probably took about 5 or 10 minutes to start vs less than a minute for XP off the hard drive.

Also I couldn't read the files off the other computer via windows networking; maybe I had to turn Samba on or something. But otherwise I was amazed. Oh, and it did recognize the NTFS file system that my hard drive is set up for.

What amazed me most is the installation recognized the cheap Chinese USB networking adapter without installing drivers.

ICJ, if you can't get it to work, give me your address and whether you want 32-bit or 64-bit, I'll mail you a disk that I've booted off of so I know it does work. It's a live CD and you can choose to install or run without installing.

Flack wrote:We run LTO-4 tapes and were planning on upgrading to LTO-5 later this year, although now that the federal budget has been slashed like a Freddy Krueger victim

You think things are bad now, just wait. I don't remember what year they said, but soon, non-discretionary spending: social security, medicare and interest on the national debt, will shortly reach 92c of every dollar of federal revenue. The entire government will have to operate on 8c of each dollar.