Hello Anthony G. Atkielski,
> Spike writes:
8< Snippage
>> TB! told me the message bases were corrupted. The folder item
>> 'maintenance' was greyed out, and TB! said to run chkdsk.
> Just from a power failure?
Yes, with the program continuing to run for TWO hours with no data
drive.
>> I ran SCANDISK and it ZEROED OUT the message bases for these two
>> lists, plus about 5 others!
> The implication is that some of the files used by TB were seriously
> corrupted. Do you run FAT or NTFS? FAT is very, very bad; you should
> always run NTFS under XP.
All drives are NTFS.
>> I have a backup done about a week ago, but I have lost all the traffic
>> since that date. I guess my question is - "Is there any other better
>> procedure I SHOULD have followed in this case?"
> More frequent backups, and if you are running a FAT file system, you
> should move to NTFS instead, which is _far_ more resistant to
> file-system corruption. It's easy to hash a FAT partition so badly
> that you lose practically everything, but NTFS is very difficult to
> corrupt.
I backup the entire 100GB drive weekly, but the failure happened a few
hours BEFORE the scheduled Sunday weekly backup. :-(
Again the drives are ALL NTFS.
>> In this case, the laptop USB port does not provide sufficient
>> current to run the external drive. I run the laptop AND the external
>> drive with associated power brick on a 550VA UPS, which lasts about
>> 4 hours (worst case). The power failure lasted just over 5 hours
>> (THREE lightning strikes in the main generator house within 30
>> seconds!). The laptop continued to run for the duration (on internal
>> battery) but the external drive did NOT. Mail runs continued to try
>> to run during the time of the outage of the external drive,
>> corrupting the message bases. Unfortunately I was not at home until
>> AFTER the 4 hours life of the UPS battery, so I could do nothing
>> about the issue after the fact.
> The UPS must have cut power at exactly the wrong instant if TB managed
> to corrupt the databases. I suppose you might have write-into cache
> enabled somewhere but I'm not sure how or if XP implements this.
The UPS cut power ONLY to the data drive while TB was pulling about
6MB of mail. The laptop continued to run (on its internal battery)
and attempted pull mail for another TWO HOURS with no data drive. I
wasn't home to intervene, and in fact did not know about the outage
until WAY too late :-(
What's that cute term for interesting tagline coincidences? {See
Below}
--
Warmest tropical wishes,
Spike
Quote for the week:
"Computers can never replace human stupidity."
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign - Against HTML Mail
\ / If it aint a webpage it shouldn't be HTML.
X Say NO! to bloatmail - ban HTML mail!
/ \ Ask Spikey, he hates everything (HTML),
especially the new AOL implementation!
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Composed & sent using TheBat! v2.12.00, hamstrung
by Windows XP 5.1, Build 2600 Service Pack 2
on a Toshiba Satellite P25-S5261 / P4-3.2GHz with
2GB RAM / 200GB HDD (100GB X2)
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