I spent yesterday morning doing backups for a client who has offshore servers, lots of them, and wants to rationalize down to two servers each backing up to the other. In my opinion a utterly sensible way to go.
Its sad however that the ludicrous cost of data transfer in Australia forces so many people to go to offshore hosting. Still while Australia has a communications minister who barely understands smoke signals things may not improve. Perhaps I am getting a bit political there.
Anyway step one is clearly to make sure we have a reasonably current copy of all of his data ,before we actually move each of his many sites That way if something goes wrong the data is OK. Its data that costs the real money. Its measured in sweat one way or another. Its why I find data recovery actually satisfying.
I have a grill in the kitchen. Huge cast iron thing that I cook on at least 4 times a week. Anyway its a present from a grateful customer for recovering his wife’s PHD thesis from a dead hard drive. Of course she should have had a backup.. but anyway.. that was satisfying.
Anyway in the afternoon I went into town to look at a bicycle with one of the girls on our race team and her husband. She bought it. And then I went out to Thomastown to talk to my brother who has a business out there. My brother is the ideal candidate for a CRM. He is sitting on a business that could easily be worth millions.. turns customers away every day cos he is so disorganized is running a 2 person workshop that could easily employ 10 and loses invoices like they don’t matter. Really upsets me. He is really really good at what he does. Absolutely the best in Melbourne. But what he does not do is run a business. He needs someone to run the business for him while he does what he does well which is run a workshop. He even knows this. Getting him to actually do it is the problem
Todays jobs. Finish these backups. Have a look at which site to move first. Update the documentation on those sites. Do a couple of changes to website… We have a privacy policy for data I wrote somewhere.. I,ll put that up. Get ABOC test site installed . Security updates on PNserver. Follow up on a couple of customers.
Perfectnotes's Blog 
You retrieve things from dead hard drives?
And more importantly, the smell of N+1 is wafting through Team Splat HQ!!
I promise to come and play track one day, perhaps a (very) secret practice day.
Love the comments on Conroy…still, as long as he looks after Kerry Stokes, it should all work out ok…shouldn’t it??
Yes. A bit depends on how screwed the drive is. Obviously. If its electronically screwed (the failure usually involves smoke.) then even to try involves finding and sacrificing an identical drive (because we need identical electronics and in these days of multi layer controller boards even on hard drives soldering em up is rarely an option) So we are essentially talking a few hundred bucks to try without the slightest guarantee of success, And a drive cobbled together like that is not going to last.. the data has to go on something else
But if it spins up its usually not that hard to get the data back. To really zap the data the military standard is to delete and then fill a space with random data 6 times, short of that we can usually get it back. Often losing all the file names. In fact I recovered 200 Gb of image data from a machine belonging to Kathys ex. When I looked at the drive it had been formatted twice, one format having gone wrong. I got (I am convinced tho he has not rung to confirm) every bit of data back…. As a freeby. But (slight snicker) without a file name. I bet he is still organising them
Oh and I hear you on Conway. An evil stupid man. I must show him about open proxy,s one day and how pathetic his attempts at censorship truly are
You can borrow my track bike any time you like . Team Splat! will be trying some flying 200's at Blackburn tomorrow. We did a session tonight and the best I could manage was 17.9 or so. Disappointing but its coming I,ll put up some pictures of Ms Soup and JAC later on the Team Splat! page. But give me a ring if you are not racing all arvo.. come down and give it a shot.