Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives, , Dryers
Quoting John Coyle jco...@iinet.net.au: My Maxtor also played up last month, and I too bought a WD MyBook replacement! Fortunately, I don't use any backup software that was mangled by the WD software, so the transfer of data was only painful in that about 10% of the image files were showing bad reads: I used the old DOS command XCOPY to do the transfer, worked very well in the background. I was also lucky (or well enough organised!) to have a second copy of the image files so that I was able to replace those that showed bad reads - nothing lost in the long run. The only issue I have now is that another external HDD now gets lost from My Computer occasionally and has to be remounted every now and then - possibly the firmware in the MyBook is interfering with it, but it's no biggy. That's started to happen with my 1.5 TB WD external drive. My laptop won't allocate it a drive letter on boot and I have to go into 'Disk Management' to allocate a drive letter manually every time I need to use it. Not sure if its an OS issue (Vista) or a problem with the drive. I've noticed that the older of my two WD MyBook's takes a long time to start up. I've learned not to be in a hurry. It takes 5 - 10 minutes sometimes before it will finally appear in My Computer under XP and Vista. But it has, so far, eventually showed up. I think the power supply problems are in the plug-in transformers supplied with the drive. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
My experience with WD drives is not great either. But not the drives themselves, the enclosures. Once I ditched the 2T RAID case and moved the drives into a third party RAID case, they became completely reliable. I don't know what crapware comes on any drive. Any drive I buy I immediately reformat without looking at what's on it. I have everything I need to manage drives built into OS X, don't want any of that junk. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
So...it sounds like the problem lies within the circuit board, not the platters. Maybe you could just replace the PCB. http://www.onepcbsolution.com/ -p On 7/31/2012 10:00 PM, Anthony Farr wrote: To all who've responded, thank you for the sympathetic comments. I guess I was correct to believe that PDMLers would find data backup to be a topic close to their own hearts, and that a saga about it would find interested readers. Something that I should point out is that the failed drive wasn't the WD MyBook 1TB, it was a Maxtor Basics Desktop 500GB which is about three years old. The WD MyBook is the unit I hold responsible for shutting down my Clickfree Automatic Backup, thus initiating my descent into backup hell. I uncased the Maxtor and tested it in a hard drive dock, and although spinning and free of any clicks it was absent from the drive list in 'My Computer'. Disk Management couldn't find it either. I took it to a data recovery service for a quote (not worth $600 for two months of uninspired unbacked-up work IMO) who said that many Maxtors Basics have a firmware fault lying dormant within, just waiting for some little stimulus like a bad shutdown to push them over the edge. The fault prevents them from initializing on startup. Maxtor users be warned. This year is the first in my time as a computer user that I've had any total hard drive failures, and now I've had two (the Maxtor and my netbook). In the past one or two of my drives had developed bad sectors, but remained in service once I'd run error detection and mapped the bad sectors out of use. regards, Anthony -- Being old doesn't seem so old now that I'm old. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives, , Dryers
From: Godfrey DiGiorgi My experience with WD drives is not great either. But not the drives themselves, the enclosures. Once I ditched the 2T RAID case and moved the drives into a third party RAID case, they became completely reliable. I don't know what crapware comes on any drive. Any drive I buy I immediately reformat without looking at what's on it. I have everything I need to manage drives built into OS X, don't want any of that junk. I have a stack of old failed IDE hard-drives waiting to go to the crusher. Wake County (where I live) has a collection point that takes old computer hardware includes secure destruction for old hard-drives. This discussion prompted me to take a look at them. Sure enough, all of them are Western Digital. Plus, now I won't be able to rest until I've pulled out all of my older USB drives and exercised them, just to make sure none of them has failed since I last used them. I've already found that I misplaced one of the power (mains) cords. Fortunately the cord from my D-BC50 battery charger fits. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives, , Dryers
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 10:23 AM, John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com wrote: I have a stack of old failed IDE hard-drives waiting to go to the crusher. Wake County (where I live) has a collection point that takes old computer hardware includes secure destruction for old hard-drives. This discussion prompted me to take a look at them. Sure enough, all of them are Western Digital. Plus, now I won't be able to rest until I've pulled out all of my older USB drives and exercised them, just to make sure none of them has failed since I last used them. I've already found that I misplaced one of the power (mains) cords. Fortunately the cord from my D-BC50 battery charger fits. I went on a round of that stuff about two months ago, when my partner asked if I had a small, spare drive that I could afford to give away. After emptying the cabinet and finding I had 27 hard drives (!) with capacities from 40G to 320G sitting untouched for at least two years, I plugged in each one in turn to see if it would boot up. Every single one of them did. (To keep from losing or mixing up power cords, I tag and bag them, tagging the drives they go with identically. Happily, I was sensible when buying all those drives: there are just four types of power supplies that can interchange across all the drives.) -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
RE: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
My Maxtor also played up last month, and I too bought a WD MyBook replacement! Fortunately, I don't use any backup software that was mangled by the WD software, so the transfer of data was only painful in that about 10% of the image files were showing bad reads: I used the old DOS command XCOPY to do the transfer, worked very well in the background. I was also lucky (or well enough organised!) to have a second copy of the image files so that I was able to replace those that showed bad reads - nothing lost in the long run. The only issue I have now is that another external HDD now gets lost from My Computer occasionally and has to be remounted every now and then - possibly the firmware in the MyBook is interfering with it, but it's no biggy. The Maxtor now seems to be Ok, and I will use it for temporary file creation where necessary: can't rely on it for long term storage, of course. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia -Original Message- From: pdml-boun...@pdml.net [mailto:pdml-boun...@pdml.net] On Behalf Of Anthony Farr Sent: Wednesday, 1 August 2012 1:01 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers To all who've responded, thank you for the sympathetic comments. I guess I was correct to believe that PDMLers would find data backup to be a topic close to their own hearts, and that a saga about it would find interested readers. Something that I should point out is that the failed drive wasn't the WD MyBook 1TB, it was a Maxtor Basics Desktop 500GB which is about three years old. The WD MyBook is the unit I hold responsible for shutting down my Clickfree Automatic Backup, thus initiating my descent into backup hell. I uncased the Maxtor and tested it in a hard drive dock, and although spinning and free of any clicks it was absent from the drive list in 'My Computer'. Disk Management couldn't find it either. I took it to a data recovery service for a quote (not worth $600 for two months of uninspired unbacked-up work IMO) who said that many Maxtors Basics have a firmware fault lying dormant within, just waiting for some little stimulus like a bad shutdown to push them over the edge. The fault prevents them from initializing on startup. Maxtor users be warned. This year is the first in my time as a computer user that I've had any total hard drive failures, and now I've had two (the Maxtor and my netbook). In the past one or two of my drives had developed bad sectors, but remained in service once I'd run error detection and mapped the bad sectors out of use. regards, Anthony -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
Quoting John Coyle jco...@iinet.net.au: My Maxtor also played up last month, and I too bought a WD MyBook replacement! Fortunately, I don't use any backup software that was mangled by the WD software, so the transfer of data was only painful in that about 10% of the image files were showing bad reads: I used the old DOS command XCOPY to do the transfer, worked very well in the background. I was also lucky (or well enough organised!) to have a second copy of the image files so that I was able to replace those that showed bad reads - nothing lost in the long run. The only issue I have now is that another external HDD now gets lost from My Computer occasionally and has to be remounted every now and then - possibly the firmware in the MyBook is interfering with it, but it's no biggy. That's started to happen with my 1.5 TB WD external drive. My laptop won't allocate it a drive letter on boot and I have to go into 'Disk Management' to allocate a drive letter manually every time I need to use it. Not sure if its an OS issue (Vista) or a problem with the drive. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ The Maxtor now seems to be Ok, and I will use it for temporary file creation where necessary: can't rely on it for long term storage, of course. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia -Original Message- From: pdml-boun...@pdml.net [mailto:pdml-boun...@pdml.net] On Behalf Of Anthony Farr Sent: Wednesday, 1 August 2012 1:01 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers To all who've responded, thank you for the sympathetic comments. I guess I was correct to believe that PDMLers would find data backup to be a topic close to their own hearts, and that a saga about it would find interested readers. Something that I should point out is that the failed drive wasn't the WD MyBook 1TB, it was a Maxtor Basics Desktop 500GB which is about three years old. The WD MyBook is the unit I hold responsible for shutting down my Clickfree Automatic Backup, thus initiating my descent into backup hell. I uncased the Maxtor and tested it in a hard drive dock, and although spinning and free of any clicks it was absent from the drive list in 'My Computer'. Disk Management couldn't find it either. I took it to a data recovery service for a quote (not worth $600 for two months of uninspired unbacked-up work IMO) who said that many Maxtors Basics have a firmware fault lying dormant within, just waiting for some little stimulus like a bad shutdown to push them over the edge. The fault prevents them from initializing on startup. Maxtor users be warned. This year is the first in my time as a computer user that I've had any total hard drive failures, and now I've had two (the Maxtor and my netbook). In the past one or two of my drives had developed bad sectors, but remained in service once I'd run error detection and mapped the bad sectors out of use. regards, Anthony -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
RE: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
This is such a heart-warming story for me. It makes me glad knowing that I'm not the only person on earth that computers hate. I will never buy another Western digital hard-drive, and especially never another MyBook. Several years ago, I bought a couple of MyBook drives (340GB 500GB) because they seemed to be really inexpensive. I found out instead that they're just really CHEAP (Of poor quality; inferior; Worthy of no respect; vulgar or contemptible). There just don't seem to be enough low, vulgar synonyms for *PIECE OF SHIT* to describe MyBook power supplies. The only positive thing I can say about them is Windoze-XP didn't seem to have any problem blowing away the pre-installed CRAPWARE. I wish I had an answer for making folders sharable in Vista, but the only Vista computer I have has only one shared folder all of the contents/sub-folders were auto-magically shared as well. From: Anthony Farr Backups, to me, originally meant CDs, then DVDs. But doubts were raised about the permanence of optical media, and my backup load was too large to periodically refresh everything, so I moved to hard drives. A couple of years ago I saw a product called Clickfree Automatic Backup, which is a small device placed in the usb cable between a computer on a wifi network and an external hard drive. With a little bit of software running on each computer in the network, they'd all be periodically backed up with no attention required. Great! And in all honesty it worked a treat. My son and I had all our data secured across 3 computers. But... and there's always a 'but', isn't there, the time came when my 500GB drive wasn't a big enough repository, so I got a 1TB WD MyBook, and my troubles began. Although there was nothing wrong with the MyBook, it had its own backup software, didn't it. No worries, thinks I, I'll just delete it from the drive. I don't want it, didn't ask for it and won't ever use it, so why not? The answer to 'why not?' was that WD had put the backup software on a fixed partition, and all my subsequent research on forum after forum informed me that the partition resists every attempt at deletion or reformatting. Bastards! Never mind, thinks I, I'll just ignore it. But... a week or two after the MyBook went into service I noticed that backups had ceased to occur on schedule. Then I noticed that the Clickfree icon in 'My Computer' had gone plain, when it should appear as a logo. Uh oh. Looking into it I found that the device, which came filled with installation files and firmware and such, was empty. The Clickfree help desk was great, I couldn't ask for better. They gave me a link to download the files needed to reflash the firmware, but to no avail. Then they emailed the files to me to ensure that I had uncorrupted copies of them. Still no success. So without any hesitation they sent me a new device. And that's where the Clickfree story ends for the moment, because it seemed to me that the MyBook had killed the Clickfree, and I wasn't about to give it a second chance. Now I was back to doing manual backups. No way was I going to use the WD backup software. I would plug the Mybook into my netbook computer and send to it, over my home network, the new files and changes from each computer . Even at 54Mb/sec it was quicker than doing a disk to disk copy on one computer, because the source computer only had to read the filefrom its disk, and the destination computer only had to write the fileto its disk. Doing the job on one computer leads to a lot of disk swapping and appallingly slow copy and paste times. It was a perfect solution until about two months ago when I took the netbook on a long car trip. At the end of the journey I found that I'd forgotten to shut it down, it was only on standby which doesn't safely park the hard drive's read/write heads. Soon afterwards it developed the faintest of clicks. Soon after that it crashed and has been out of service since. My backup strategy had been derailed. Fast forward to last week. It was cold, so our heaters were cranked up to full power. It was a wet, grey day so the family was inside using televisions and Nintendo Wiis and computers and all the accessories that go with those things. The kettle was on to brew a pot of tea. The washing machine was in mid-load. Then... my dear wife, who knew not what she was about to do, started the clothes dryer. Everything went very quiet for half a second, then our son complained about 'unsaved progress', but no harm was done, or so I thought. I was wrong. The external hard drive on my computer, where I keep my documents because they're safer there than in a laptop's internal drive, was gone from the drive list in 'My Computer'. The unexpected shutdown had prematurely ended its life, and I'd lost all my new files and changes of the last two months, because I hadn't put a new backup process into place. The only positive spin I can put on it is that I've been in a
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
Ditto on Macintosh computers. Using one gig out of the box as a backup one finds out that attaching through a powered hub creates a hard drive that won't wake up for Retrospect, which makes for no backup. When asleep, if it doesn't wake up fast enough for Retrospect, which reports it to the OS as being missing, so it is unmounted by the OS. It's a faulty combination of firmware and non-erasable software that makes it unreliable for anything other than normal storage. It still sits on the shelf, waiting for some day that I may want to use it for something else. All of my other drives are connected the same way, and work reliably, or as reliable as any hard drive. I keep 5 TB of unused spares on standby (2,2,1). On Jul 31, 2012, at 03:17 , John Sessoms wrote: This is such a heart-warming story for me. It makes me glad knowing that I'm not the only person on earth that computers hate. I will never buy another Western digital hard-drive, and especially never another MyBook. Several years ago, I bought a couple of MyBook drives (340GB 500GB) because they seemed to be really inexpensive. I found out instead that they're just really CHEAP (Of poor quality; inferior; Worthy of no respect; vulgar or contemptible). There just don't seem to be enough low, vulgar synonyms for *PIECE OF SHIT* to describe MyBook power supplies. The only positive thing I can say about them is Windoze-XP didn't seem to have any problem blowing away the pre-installed CRAPWARE. I wish I had an answer for making folders sharable in Vista, but the only Vista computer I have has only one shared folder all of the contents/sub-folders were auto-magically shared as well. From: Anthony Farr Backups, to me, originally meant CDs, then DVDs. But doubts were raised about the permanence of optical media, and my backup load was too large to periodically refresh everything, so I moved to hard drives. A couple of years ago I saw a product called Clickfree Automatic Backup, which is a small device placed in the usb cable between a computer on a wifi network and an external hard drive. With a little bit of software running on each computer in the network, they'd all be periodically backed up with no attention required. Great! And in all honesty it worked a treat. My son and I had all our data secured across 3 computers. But... and there's always a 'but', isn't there, the time came when my 500GB drive wasn't a big enough repository, so I got a 1TB WD MyBook, and my troubles began. Although there was nothing wrong with the MyBook, it had its own backup software, didn't it. No worries, thinks I, I'll just delete it from the drive. I don't want it, didn't ask for it and won't ever use it, so why not? The answer to 'why not?' was that WD had put the backup software on a fixed partition, and all my subsequent research on forum after forum informed me that the partition resists every attempt at deletion or reformatting. Bastards! Never mind, thinks I, I'll just ignore it. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
Quoting John Sessoms jsessoms...@nc.rr.com: This is such a heart-warming story for me. It makes me glad knowing that I'm not the only person on earth that computers hate. I will never buy another Western digital hard-drive, and especially never another MyBook. Several years ago, I bought a couple of MyBook drives (340GB 500GB) because they seemed to be really inexpensive. I found out instead that they're just really CHEAP (Of poor quality; inferior; Worthy of no respect; vulgar or contemptible). There just don't seem to be enough low, vulgar synonyms for *PIECE OF SHIT* to describe MyBook power supplies. My experience with WD externals is similar. The first MyBook died after about 2 years of service but I haven't thrown it out yet - I might rip the drive out of the casing and fit it into a powered drive case to see if there's any life left. I then bought two WD Essentials. The first one's power adapter died twice (replaced once under warranty) and it's currently working in a third party powered case after the built in power supply died. The second one seems to work when it wants to, which doesn't always coincide with when I want it to. I haven't any experience with other brands so maybe this behaviour is just par for the course. Sorry I can't help with your problem, Anthony. Cheers Brian ++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ The only positive thing I can say about them is Windoze-XP didn't seem to have any problem blowing away the pre-installed CRAPWARE. I wish I had an answer for making folders sharable in Vista, but the only Vista computer I have has only one shared folder all of the contents/sub-folders were auto-magically shared as well. From: Anthony Farr Backups, to me, originally meant CDs, then DVDs. But doubts were raised about the permanence of optical media, and my backup load was too large to periodically refresh everything, so I moved to hard drives. A couple of years ago I saw a product called Clickfree Automatic Backup, which is a small device placed in the usb cable between a computer on a wifi network and an external hard drive. With a little bit of software running on each computer in the network, they'd all be periodically backed up with no attention required. Great! And in all honesty it worked a treat. My son and I had all our data secured across 3 computers. But... and there's always a 'but', isn't there, the time came when my 500GB drive wasn't a big enough repository, so I got a 1TB WD MyBook, and my troubles began. Although there was nothing wrong with the MyBook, it had its own backup software, didn't it. No worries, thinks I, I'll just delete it from the drive. I don't want it, didn't ask for it and won't ever use it, so why not? The answer to 'why not?' was that WD had put the backup software on a fixed partition, and all my subsequent research on forum after forum informed me that the partition resists every attempt at deletion or reformatting. Bastards! Never mind, thinks I, I'll just ignore it. But... a week or two after the MyBook went into service I noticed that backups had ceased to occur on schedule. Then I noticed that the Clickfree icon in 'My Computer' had gone plain, when it should appear as a logo. Uh oh. Looking into it I found that the device, which came filled with installation files and firmware and such, was empty. The Clickfree help desk was great, I couldn't ask for better. They gave me a link to download the files needed to reflash the firmware, but to no avail. Then they emailed the files to me to ensure that I had uncorrupted copies of them. Still no success. So without any hesitation they sent me a new device. And that's where the Clickfree story ends for the moment, because it seemed to me that the MyBook had killed the Clickfree, and I wasn't about to give it a second chance. Now I was back to doing manual backups. No way was I going to use the WD backup software. I would plug the Mybook into my netbook computer and send to it, over my home network, the new files and changes from each computer . Even at 54Mb/sec it was quicker than doing a disk to disk copy on one computer, because the source computer only had to read the filefrom its disk, and the destination computer only had to write the fileto its disk. Doing the job on one computer leads to a lot of disk swapping and appallingly slow copy and paste times. It was a perfect solution until about two months ago when I took the netbook on a long car trip. At the end of the journey I found that I'd forgotten to shut it down, it was only on standby which doesn't safely park the hard drive's read/write heads. Soon afterwards it developed the faintest of clicks. Soon after that it crashed and has been out of service since. My backup strategy had been derailed. Fast forward to last week. It was cold, so our heaters were cranked up to
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
on 2012-07-31 15:40 Brian Walters wrote My experience with WD externals is similar. i have a 1GB WD dual drive RAID unit; it's still working, but it's noisy and RAID 0 performance rarely outweighs the potential for failure for me, so it sits idle; it was remarkably cheap for a fast Firewire 800 drive at the time, so it got past my dislike of manufacturer-packaged drives -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
To all who've responded, thank you for the sympathetic comments. I guess I was correct to believe that PDMLers would find data backup to be a topic close to their own hearts, and that a saga about it would find interested readers. Something that I should point out is that the failed drive wasn't the WD MyBook 1TB, it was a Maxtor Basics Desktop 500GB which is about three years old. The WD MyBook is the unit I hold responsible for shutting down my Clickfree Automatic Backup, thus initiating my descent into backup hell. I uncased the Maxtor and tested it in a hard drive dock, and although spinning and free of any clicks it was absent from the drive list in 'My Computer'. Disk Management couldn't find it either. I took it to a data recovery service for a quote (not worth $600 for two months of uninspired unbacked-up work IMO) who said that many Maxtors Basics have a firmware fault lying dormant within, just waiting for some little stimulus like a bad shutdown to push them over the edge. The fault prevents them from initializing on startup. Maxtor users be warned. This year is the first in my time as a computer user that I've had any total hard drive failures, and now I've had two (the Maxtor and my netbook). In the past one or two of my drives had developed bad sectors, but remained in service once I'd run error detection and mapped the bad sectors out of use. regards, Anthony -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
hear, hear on the crapware on a WD external drive. Had one drive with the smart ware and some how I found a way to by pass it. Couldn't figure out how to get it to work--but that's because the smartware back-up software was really crapware. Hope you get stuff up and running nicely, Anthony. Cheers, Christine On Jul 31, 2012, at 4:48 PM, Joseph McAllister pentax...@mac.com wrote: Ditto on Macintosh computers. Using one gig out of the box as a backup one finds out that attaching through a powered hub creates a hard drive that won't wake up for Retrospect, which makes for no backup. When asleep, if it doesn't wake up fast enough for Retrospect, which reports it to the OS as being missing, so it is unmounted by the OS. It's a faulty combination of firmware and non-erasable software that makes it unreliable for anything other than normal storage. It still sits on the shelf, waiting for some day that I may want to use it for something else. All of my other drives are connected the same way, and work reliably, or as reliable as any hard drive. I keep 5 TB of unused spares on standby (2,2,1). On Jul 31, 2012, at 03:17 , John Sessoms wrote: This is such a heart-warming story for me. It makes me glad knowing that I'm not the only person on earth that computers hate. I will never buy another Western digital hard-drive, and especially never another MyBook. Several years ago, I bought a couple of MyBook drives (340GB 500GB) because they seemed to be really inexpensive. I found out instead that they're just really CHEAP (Of poor quality; inferior; Worthy of no respect; vulgar or contemptible). There just don't seem to be enough low, vulgar synonyms for *PIECE OF SHIT* to describe MyBook power supplies. The only positive thing I can say about them is Windoze-XP didn't seem to have any problem blowing away the pre-installed CRAPWARE. I wish I had an answer for making folders sharable in Vista, but the only Vista computer I have has only one shared folder all of the contents/sub-folders were auto-magically shared as well. From: Anthony Farr Backups, to me, originally meant CDs, then DVDs. But doubts were raised about the permanence of optical media, and my backup load was too large to periodically refresh everything, so I moved to hard drives. A couple of years ago I saw a product called Clickfree Automatic Backup, which is a small device placed in the usb cable between a computer on a wifi network and an external hard drive. With a little bit of software running on each computer in the network, they'd all be periodically backed up with no attention required. Great! And in all honesty it worked a treat. My son and I had all our data secured across 3 computers. But... and there's always a 'but', isn't there, the time came when my 500GB drive wasn't a big enough repository, so I got a 1TB WD MyBook, and my troubles began. Although there was nothing wrong with the MyBook, it had its own backup software, didn't it. No worries, thinks I, I'll just delete it from the drive. I don't want it, didn't ask for it and won't ever use it, so why not? The answer to 'why not?' was that WD had put the backup software on a fixed partition, and all my subsequent research on forum after forum informed me that the partition resists every attempt at deletion or reformatting. Bastards! Never mind, thinks I, I'll just ignore it. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
Re: OT - Backups Cockups, Netbooks MyBooks, Hard Drives , Dryers
On Jul 31, 2012, at 10:17 PM, John Sessoms wrote: This is such a heart-warming story for me. It makes me glad knowing that I'm not the only person on earth that computers hate. I think you'll find many friends in that club ;) Although I managed to set up my new wireless router yesterday without too much gnashing. I will never buy another Western digital hard-drive, and especially never another MyBook. I have a couple of Seagate USB enclosures at the moment. I've had one fail on me, which is why I now use two of them. I haven't read anything into the failure as any brand will have failures occasionally so I need to be prepared for it. The only positive thing I can say about them is Windoze-XP didn't seem to have any problem blowing away the pre-installed CRAPWARE. First thing I did with my drives was reformat them to HFS+ (the Mac system) as I wanted to use them with Time Machine. All I want in a hard drive is bulk storage and I'd never allow them to install software on my computer. If I couldn't prevent the installation I'd send the drive back. I wish I had an answer for making folders sharable in Vista, but the only Vista computer I have has only one shared folder all of the contents/sub-folders were auto-magically shared as well. I've had problems sharing in Windows, Mac and Linux. I never seem to be able to get it to work consistently across multiple platforms so in the end I gave up and started using sneakernet. It's pretty rare that I need to share anything these days. Sharing printers was even worse. The answer to that was to buy a laptop and carry it over to the printer :) Cheers, Dave -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
