"what are the odds of a failure happening while you're backing up? I've had it happen to me twice, but in the Legion I'm known as Low Probability Woman, so I figured it was just another coincidence."
Well, I've been called the "weirdness magnet," so it could be the same thing. (Have you noticed that there really are certain people who just draw The Oddness around and upon themselves like... er, um, magnetic dust to a platter? I know some people...)
But seriously, I do think that backup software might just aggravate a flaky hard drive to the point of collapse. Consider:
Here we have your hard drive, which, unbeknownst to you, is about thirty pageouts away from a serious nervous breakdown. Were it a person, it would be that nice, quiet guy at the end of the block, who never bothers the neighbors.
Here we have backup software, whose job is to sort through that hard drive from top to bottom, read every bit on it, and write it to something else. This can be considered similar to a team of polite but ruthless forensics detectives. They walk into this guy's bedroom, start in the left-hand corner closest to the door, and carefully rifle through and catalog the contents of that room, cubic inch by cubic inch. They are scrupulously careful to put everything back into precisely the same place.
I think it could be just the thing to put a borderline case right over the edge. Out comes the machete, furniture and body parts start flying around, and you read about it the next day on the Evening News. Or Fox, if the guy was a registered Democrat.
To deanthropomorphize for a second, I mean that when the backup software reaches the point where the hard drive is seriously flaky, and starts doing intensive reads off of it, I can see that crashing the system and fragging the data to hell. Which is what happened to me.
The upshot of the story is, regular incremental backups tend to avoid this problem by not waiting until the hard drive is a basket case with a sock drawer full of carefully catalogued body parts, at which point it's generally too late. And as an added bonus, if you do crash in the midst of data backup, hopefully you've only lost a day's (or week's, depending) work.
I lost a month. I'm shifting to weekly backups, me...
Argh! My very heartfelt condolences.
And I feel your pain: I lost the internal hard drive of my powerbook this past Thursday... yup, due to a freak accident during backup. I think it's karma's way of saying, "You can't get out of this by backing up just when you think you have a problem, buddy. Do it right."
On a positive note, the 10.3 Firewire data-loss bug has been fixed... at least by the drive manufacturers: they're offering firmware updates. The problem extends to some Firewire 400 drives, so check it out: I just had to update my LaCie d2 120.
I second Carbon Copy Cloner as a backup solution, as well. That, plus a second firewire drive (or if you're feeling racy, two in a RAID using Apple's Disk Utility) should minimize the chances of lightning striking you twice.
Teresa, IIRC a friend collected them into a photo album. It was a drawer full of loose disposable-camera photo prints... the prints vanished after I found them, and I think another tagging friend had collected them.
I need to get back in touch with him anyhow... I'll see if I can get them scanned and submitted.
Abe is exactly right: I knew more taggers and graffiti writers in art school than I'd ever expected to see.
And now I wish you were running the city. I'd love to see the 6 train roll into the station as a huge wall of color and shape. Although part of me wonders whether an "official" project would have attracted the talents that were invested in the underground life.
But I'd dearly love to list "G Train number four, car five" as an exhibit on my resume. Hee.
You know, an acquaintance of mine went to Pratt Institute. He was one of the most incredible hands with pastel, colored paper, and colored pencil: when he graduated, he got a job somewhere in Sweden, drawing all day for something like $100,000 a year.
He'd learned his technique, not on paper, but as a graffiti artist. When he graduated, I found a portfolio drawer in one of the studios, full of photos of these incredible shapes and colors that came off the brick wall, done with Krylon spraypaint and sometimes some cardboard, to mask a hard edge. I'd had no idea.
Thanks for the site. I'm in awe.
This being an alternate timeline makes horrifying sense. In that vein, I propose the title "Schrodinger's President."
I would be afraid of having nightmares about this tonight, but I'm already half convinced that we've been in one for the last three years, and will never wake up.
Oh, thank you!
And here I was having a lousy morning.
The tracks nearest the platforms were still in use, but not the center section92s old express tracks. It was late. The lighting was dim. And when I glanced toward the unlit center track section at the end of the station, I saw what looked like a half-size Viking ship, lying at anchor in the pool of standing water that covered the tracks.
I'm not crazy! I'm not crazy! It was there! Yay!
I have doubted my sanity for years after glimpsing that on a pass through that station... and was too afraid that I really was nuts to go back until just recently, and of course that whole area is refurbished.
Bless you! You have restored my faith in my poor little overtaxed brain.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 9 |
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