Omaha boards, masking tape, scanners and backups

Another evening with the static grass applicator, this time on the three trench boards, which required a little work with masking tape so as not to get the grass in the trenches.

Also did a quick drybrush on the test piece. I'm waiting on WWS shipping me the non-aerosol (pump action) version of the spray before I can shoot video: while the store room I'm handling scenery boards in is big enough for an aerosol not to be a hazard, my workbench is in my office, which is distinctly cosier, and I'd rather not asphyxiate

Salutary lesson of the week: I am currently scanning and OCRing about 100 pages of printout that I did at one point about 25 years ago have on disk on my last Apple Mac but... um... about six or seven.    Somewhere along the way they failed to get transferred across machines (I'm pretty sure they survived to around 2000 in a set of Claris Emailer folders, and possibly on my last mail server but three, but those HDs are long gone :(). Lessons learned, especially nowadays:

• if you're attached to it, back it the heck up. Most stuff I care about is backed up both on Dropbox and on a Synology NAS at home, as well as local disk on my Macs. Stuff I'm really passionate about also has a copy on Google Drive.
• There is EVEN LESS excuse for it than there was 25 years ago, with the advent of the cloud: one of my friends had a copy of most if not all the stuff I'm scanning, and like an idiot when she found it for me in 2007 I managed to accidentally delete it with no copy. And hers was on floppies...
• On a happier note, LeadTools OCR is a very nice free app (for Mac among others) for converting scanned documents to Text. Surprisingly error free and comes with a nice set of cleanup tools: I'm averaging about 3 errors a page on about 8 point laser printed text, which plenty few enough I'm happy to correct them by hand afterwards.

I missed a category in #hobbystreak

Namely, "Sysadmin".

The server that hosts both the club and show sites decided to throw a sizeable tantrum this morning. I suspect it was sulking after Saturday's power-cut, and one of its HD's decided to throw lots and lots and lots of errors. 

Of course, the other half of its mirror drive set had packed up last week, and I'd not got round to ordering a spare (normally I carry one, but James needed one for his games machine...) until the weekend.

Fortunately, I take backups. These days, onto 12TB of RAID'ed Network Attached Storage. And this is why. 

Decided that enough was enough (that's the fourth drive fail on that server in about 4 years, and I think there's an issue with its SATA bus), so finally bit the bullet and restored everything across to the new server once the Amazon order of 4 drives arrived :D Which was its OWN pain, as the new server's running a new version of the OS, not everything 'just works'... I spent two hours upgrading the club forum, and another hour just now chasing why I could receive but not send mail. 

You should notice the club and show sites are a bit quicker, and you should now be able to access them again!

Sure, you have a backup. But can you recover it?

I had a nice little four hour slot between morning family service and evening carol concert today, in which I was going to nip out to the workshop and finish off a couple of the Warbases buildings...

First 'er indoors decided that since James' drum kit and my bass rig were out of the playroom in church, she'd blitz it and clean the floor, which cost me an hour in being required to assist.

Then mysteriously the house server died and refused to reboot. I'm still not entirely convinced it didn't get bumped with the vacuum cleaner (it lives under a desk in the playroom) but I wouldn't dream of suggesting such a thing, of course....

Investigation reveals that the boot drive (a nice newish 64G SSD) is dead. And thus so are the church and club websites and our email, among other things.

Fortunately... I have a backup. Specifically, and by design, the old and mostly identical non-SSD SATA boot drive is still in the case. Its configs are a bit out of date but... guess what? I have a backup of those as well. :D (On Amazon S3, if you must know.)

This /was/ a little hairy, since for one awful moment I thought that the only copy of the passphrase and security keys for the backup was on the dead drive (another lesson learned!)...

Key takeaway though? No-one was ever a hero for taking a backup. You're only a hero if you can restore it afterwards. So if you've been convinced by my previous rants? Go fire up your last backup and check you can read it and restore bits of it if you have to!

After a very hectic weekend...

...involving a wargames show, too much gardening ("you're kidding, dear, you really want THAT out from amid the roses???"), a drive to Dulwich and back to plot a musical for the 2014 Worldcon, I don't, I fear, have much to report...

...except that:

• Warlord are dreadfully slow. The order I placed on Monday that it would have been REALLY NICE to have for this Saturday just gone is still marked as 'in picking'. Not impressed at all, guys. If it's still in picking next time I check on Monday, I'm cancelling it.
• Remember me ranting about backups? The good news is that for reasons best known to itself, the hard drive that wouldn't spin up decided it would when sat on my desk at work on Friday. End result, 65GB of irreplacable video and audio files retrieved to another machine... or three. Phew.

P.S. It is, in the words of the song, Too Damn Hot.

Remember me ranting about backups?

That's here, in case you missed it.

Well, here's a cautionary tale.

I co-produced and MD'ed a fantasy musical, which started life as a set of songs a couple of decades ago and plain grew, at a SF con a few years ago. We got FOUR people to video it from different angles, and I took all four sets of video files, and, just to prove I'm not a complete moron, backed them up on TWO different hard drives, one a HP Media Vault, one a WD 1TB external USB drive, because when we have more time, we're going to make a DVD.

Both of these have been stored in reasonable conditions in two different rooms in the house.

The HP Media Vault packed up a couple of months ago. I finally got around to checking it this week, because I need those video files. The drive has the click of death, and isn't coming back.

No worries. I can get the files off the WD external.

It won't spin up.

ARRGGGHH!

You can never have enough backups of critical data.

Backups: a public service announcement

*dons 'trust me, I'm an IT professional and security certifier' hat*

A while ago, I was doing some research for the longboat model I got as a blogger Secret Santa, and found a link to a build on Model Ship World which included some very useful photos of a part I want to built using work's new 3D printer. So I bookmarked it.

Go on, click the link.

Yeah.

Right.

It turns out Model Ship World had a catastrophic hard drive failure shortly after migrating all the posts to their new forum system. Every single post from the old forum is gone: most of them might be on web.archive.org, but they're a complete sod to find because of the way phpBB handles its URLs, and I'm pretty sure the entry I want isn't.

The moral of this story, because, damnit, there are several, and I'm actually both quite cross and dead serious:

The Internet is not your memory.

There is absolutely no guarantee that todays useful link won't be tomorrow's "404: The requested URL /phpBB2/viewtopic.php was not found on this server." If you want to save a link for later for research purposes, use something like Evernote that will store you a copy of the content locally on your hard drive.

Back the heck up.

The above applies just as much to your blog, my blog, anything that's stored online/on the Cloud. Blogger has a backup facility - go to Settings/Other/Export Blog and grab a copy of the export of your blog contents every so often and save it someplace you can find it again. This won't save your images, but if you go to picasaweb.google.com, it should redirect you to a page where you can download the Picasa album that corresponds to your blog photos, if you haven't kept your own local copies.

Do it now. I'll wait while you do.

Why? Because Google have already proved that the thing they're really betting the farm on is Google+, and one day I will NOT be surprised to discover that my choices have become 'use Google+' or 'export your blog someplace else'. If you're not paying for a product (Blogger), remember, you are the product, and if we as users of a service stop being worth their while, they'll drop us. Same goes for Flickr (which Yahoo! seem bound and determined to screw up), Google Wave and heaven knows what else.

You're welcome to assume competence, good faith and lack of self-interest on the part of people providing an online service, but take backups anyway: an errant 747 hitting their data centre, or Amazon S2 having a major outage, is going to ruin their day however nice they are. And you don't know that they take proper backups, that they won't someday forget or fail to pay their hosting bill, or that they aren't one guy with one small Linux box in a cupboard at the end of an ADSL line (I should know. I am that guy, and I do take multiple backups and carry spares of most bits of hardware!).

Back the heck up 2.

Your hard drive. We live in a world where a scary amount of the information we create, be it text, photos, whatever, only exists in digital form. Look back at Model Ship World. The admin's defence was, to paraphrase: "we're not IT professionals, we didn't take backups, move on". I made a point of closing that window before I was tempted to register and comment (which would probably have resulted in my time as a registered user being one of the shortest on record).

This is 2013. There is absolutely NO excuse for not having a backup of the data you care about, doubly or triply so if it's not your bloomin' data. Hard drives fail. You do stupid things (I lost a massive pile of cherished RPG logs by accidentally having the wrong folder selected when I did my two sets of keystrokes for 'move to trash, empty trash' in too-quick succession).

Go to your favourite tech retailer and buy a USB hard drive - here, look, I'll even provide a link to a nice 500GB drive for under 40 quid! Label it prominently 'BACKUPS', don't use it for anything else, and use any of the scads of free backup solutions (some of which even come with your OS) to keep a safe copy of your data. If you want to use an online backup solution as well, that's fine - but don't make it your only one, for reasons stated above.

Oh, and every now and then, make sure you can recover something from the drive. If there's the merest hint of a problem due to the drive itself, buy a new one. There's a saying in IT: "No-one cares if you can back up. Only if you can recover."

Is your data worth more than £40 to you?