self doofus and no backup...

[Gizmo]

I'd been having fps droops with my favourite online game and went reading for solutions. I realised it was overriding and using my crappy onboard card not my gaming card. Apparent solution: switch the onboard card off and it will default to the GTX card no problems.

Turns out Lenovo don't like you doing this despite others saying it works on their Ideapads.... Black screen, can't even get to BIOS or safe mode.

Booted up the One key recovery. It says wipe system partition and reset. However no manual backup point so its back to the basic setup. But it seems to suggest its system files only not full drive...

Me thinking that this doesn't touch personal files does this..... Nope it wiped the entire machine, new user the lot.

Luckily I haven't got much that I haven't emailed or sent online in some form. A few things but manageable to deal with.

Note to self: do backup point before playing with settings!

Although one thing: after reinstall the game does see the gaming card and I have decent fps.... now just reinstalling everything and watch the issue doesn't reoccur!

[sms001]

The burned hand teaches best, eh?

[Gizmo]

Yeah. Its not the end of the world because the machine is running so much better now. And since its me not my ex hubby or anything I'm blaming ME not the world, the machine etc.....

[lordlundar]

And now for the real kicker: did you check the game's video settings? A number of titles will allow you to select which card it will read from.

[Gizmo]

I did. The reason I was playing around was because the game couldn't set to anything other than the Intel Integrated Card. Rather than the NVidia GTX 660M which has 2GB dedicated RAM....

Now it allows me to use either.

[EricKei]

Awesome ^_^

I learned a similar lesson oh, back in the 90's, when I ended up wiping a hard drive that I thought was a total loss because I had misinterpreted some diagnostics I had been running ~_~ (HD had damage, but would have been 90+% recoverable if I had stopped what I was doing and did so)

My last backup at the time had been something like six months prior, and I was in "Ya know, I'd better do a backup soon" mode...But I never did x.x Lost as many months' worth of script edits (for a video game project) as a result. Also all of the random crap I had downloaded from the internet during that time, too.

A lesson harshly learned, yet WELL-learned.

[wolfie]

There are 2 kinds of people: Those who have lost data due to hard drive problems, and those who haven't YET. Backups keep the loss from becoming permanent.

[EricKei]

You're preaching to the choir here, wolfie ^_^

The experience taught me to be downright paranoid about that sort of thing, especially with actually-important data, such as that I dealt with when I ended up doing accounting software support and training a number of years later. You'd be appalled at how many people don't understand what backups are or why to do them or why they should be made to external media x.x Granted, the percentage is in the single digits, but every so often, when I asked someone with corrupted data "OK, when was your last backup?", I got the dreaded reply: "...Backup?"



And, worse, there was this one time when I went to help a client with data issues who HAD been backing up...by relying upon the location's regular server backups to do it for them -- instead of doing at least a periodical one from within the software itself (the latter pulls in a greater number of useful files from multiple folders, you see). The thing is, they no longer had anyone on staff who knew how to run the server backup software. By the time I figured their system out, I was able to find their last good data backup...from 5 years prior.

All I can say is, those people were really lucky that we had a (3rd party) data repair guy we could call who is incredibly skilled at what he does. Still wasn't able to get 100% of the data back -- and this is accounting software (subject to IRS audit at any time), so 99.99% accuracy really doesn't cut it -- but he was able to recover most of it, and the clients had to go back and compare their paper records to the software's for the 'recovered' period of time (a couple of years, at least). It also cost them over a grand in data repair fees and data entry labor, above and beyond what we charged to get me out there to begin with.

I'm lucky in that I've only ever lost personal data and some project data (that I was able to reproduce, but it took weeks) -- never anything that would actively cost a company money.

Generally speaking, though, once I impressed upon a client the importance of backups, and the consequences of corrupt data (pretty much inevitable for any file above a given size or age, especially if it's being run over a network), most people go "Oh. We'll be making backups daily, then." Good client. Have a cookie! ^_^ FTR, the "consequences" of data corruption/loss, if it's not recoverable, are, of course, having to start over from scratch and re-entering all of the valid list data, customer/employee/vendor info, and any and all transactions (checks, invoices, bills, payments/payroll taxes). By hand. For whatever time period they need detail data. If even one document is left out, the numbers end up wrong. NOT FUN.

[Gizmo]

To be fair I am good about backing up stuff to my harddrive on a one to one basis or emailing it to myself - I just never got around to doing a full image.

Home computer - my risk.
Business computer - I have educated bosses on the stupidities of not taking backups and offsite backups seriously before.

Just with the last year and it being late night plus over believing people on the internet that it was *safe*... yeah, dumbass move.

[RichS]

Back in the early days of Windows XP, a major error happened on my home computer. It's been awhile, so I don't know the specifics...Anyway, I set myself to fix it, first by doing a sysem restore, then installing XP on top of itself. Both didn't work, and ended up corrupting all of the data.

I had backups of everything, except the pictures, including the most recent ones of our new nephew.

Thanks to Convar's recovery software, I was able to get @ 95% of the pictures back.

Now at home, I have 2 routine backups, 1 every week and one every month. I'm working on the monthly being rotated between work and home.

At work, when I started, the previous person was transitioning between backup solutions...so no backup. That was before we switched ISPs, the old ISP is where the school's offsite backup solution was at. Of course, I didn't know about this, so I got the surprise when the whole backup server/NAS appeared in my office one day.

Now, I have a rudimentary on- and offsite backup system, and I'm working on a permanent one. I don't want a repeat of one of the school systems that's under contract - they had lost all of their financial data last year, and thought they had backups. All of the backup files were blank...

[greek_jester]

Generally speaking, though, once I impressed upon a client the importance of backups, and the consequences of corrupt data (pretty much inevitable for any file above a given size or age, especially if it's being run over a network), most people go "Oh. We'll be making backups daily, then." Good client. Have a cookie! ^_^ FTR, the "consequences" of data corruption/loss, if it's not recoverable, are, of course, having to start over from scratch and re-entering all of the valid list data, customer/employee/vendor info, and any and all transactions (checks, invoices, bills, payments/payroll taxes). By hand. For whatever time period they need detail data. If even one document is left out, the numbers end up wrong. NOT FUN.

*shudders* Sorry, you just triggered a flashback.

About 15 years ago at a past job in another town, our stock/accounting program had a major crash. No problem, go to the nightly backup and restore, then just re-enter today's stuff. Slight problem. The backup was corrupt. As were the nightly backups for the rest of the week (all, incidentally, tape backups).

In the end the company had to go back to the weekly backups which were transmitted to another server off-site to get the data restored. Then they told us to pull everything done that week, re-enter it and then re-file it all. The problem was they had the bare minimum number of people to run the department; holidays and sick-leave created a real problem. Oh, you don't have enough time to do it in the day? Fine, no problem, stay an hour late to get it done. How much overtime are we paying you? Oh, we're not, you're salaried so you only get your normal pay. Time off in lieu? No, we don't have enough cover to let anyone have non-mandatory time off.

Needless to say we screamed extremely loudly and refused to do anything other than our normal time on the clock (and we also stopped coming in that extra quarter of a hour early to clear some of the backlog of filing, plus doing things through our tea breaks and parts of our lunch breaks).

After a few days of threatening us with write ups (to which we countered we would be heading for a tribunal) they finally backed down and hired some data entry temps to bring the load down. After their shenanigans, though, they ended up having to hire a temp every couple of months to keep on top of the filing, since we made sure after that to be logged in at our desks not a minute before we were scheduled to start, took our full hour's lunch break and 15 minute morning/afternoon tea breaks (up in the staff room or in the pub rather than at our desks), and started shutting down as soon as the clock hit 5pm.

Yes, we did set reminders on Outlook to be sure we had it timed to the minute, and the one time someone tried to complain about our timekeeping the whole department pulled out photocopies of our contracts with the relevant passages about lunch hours, tea breaks, and time off in lieu for working outside of our scheduled work hours highlighted for easy reference. They didn't complain again after that.

[Jetfire]

I've gone throuhg 3 or 4 machines at home that I can remember easily. Most of the time I end up having a fried board, but the drives are usually recoverable.

Once I had one drive start clicking on me. Luckily I had 2 HD's in the machine so I made sure everything was backed up to the other drive before it clicked its last click.

Another time I lost a drive suddenly. Luckily, it was just the control board that croaked, so I was able to buy the same drive off ebay, swap the boards and it came back to life long enough to pull what I need off of it.

Nowadays, I always try to have multiple drives on my desktop so the important stuff is on at least 2 drives. But I'm also finding that most of my life is in the Cloud. If Google ever has a major crash with data loss I'll be somewhat screwed, but otherwise, locally it's just a matter of reinstalling the games and other programs and I'm good to go again.

[Silent-Hunter]

I can't do full backups anymore, because I had to leave my tape drive at home when I moved. I can back up small stuff, but not my whole system.

[EricKei]

Aaaaaaaaaaand wouldn't ya know it...

This past week, GraphicsGrrl here at da paper informed me that she had been getting some BSOD's on the graphics system -- an 8-ish year old dual XEON CPU system that had been our previous "server". Checking the logs turned up only one such occurrence, which indicated a STOP error that applied only to pre-SP1 XP; she was running SP3.

Anyhoo. I was checking it out on Thursday and Friday, and I DID get a BSOD indicating that the boot drive was going the way of the dodo. The next time we fired the sucker up, it emitted a high pitched noise -- TL;DR: the voltage regulator had gone out, resulting in, among other things, a failure to POST, and the CPU exhaust fans spinning so fast that they were making a poster several feet away wave in the breeze o_O

Did some troubleshooting, called Hell computers, found out that replacing the part and any damage resulting from the voltage boost (5-12v instead of the 1.5v the board expected) would have cost almost as much as starting over.

Spent the weekend repurposing my home system as her replacement, as she NEEDS to be up on Monday~Wednesdays, and no shops in the area carry anything up to the task (heavy PS/Illustrator use, making ads). Office is gonna get me parts for a replacement this week, so both of us are getting upgrades as a result Thus, a silver lining.

[lordlundar]

just do yourself a favour. Avoid doing backups on the Western Digital MyBook series of external Hard Drives. The data on them is encrypted so if the drive starts to have issues the data is lost.