BT Trains email crash

[rpierce000]

Due to a lost hard drive, long story (keep small children with liquid away from computers), BT Trains has lost several months of email. If you have an order in progress that we have not checked up with you on or are talking to us in any way and we have not responded, PLEASE try again. All of the bttrains.com addresses are back up and being monitored, we just lost the histories.

 

Of course this happened while we got a new BlueRay backup drive and were replacing a failed drive in the RAID on the big server and unloading two skids of trains from Japan.

 

Do NOT buy the Seagate Barracuda.11 1.5GB drives unless you plan to replace at the 2 year mark. I have lost THREE of TEN in the last three months, all between 18 and 26 months old.

 

Switching to Hitachi, I have never had them fail. Of course before this I had never had Seagates fail. I hope SSD comes down in price soon, but they fail as well.

 

All of the orders from the skids will go out tomorrow, as scheduled, those were all in the database.

 

This ONLY affected email, the site, database, etc are all either on the big RAID or with our host and backed up regularly (so they tell us).

 

Thank you for your patience while we work through this.

 

Bob

bob@bttrains.com

[Martijn Meerts]

All harddrives fail at some point in time, but there are certain brands/types known to fail a bit more regularly.. IBM used to have drives called DeskStar, which got nicknamed DeathStar quite fast because they consistently failed after less than a year :)

 

Best experience I've had with hard drives are the Samsung ones. I have about 15-20 of them in various machines, and so far only 1 of them has failed after sitting in a quite heavily used NAS for 3 years.

[The_Ghan]

Excuses ... excuses ... excuses ...

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[David]

Hitachi is a good brand for server storage. SSD is very risky for storage - when a mechanical harddrive fails you might have some warning, and may be able to copy files off the drive before it completely fails or even recover them after (for a price). With SSD the controller can go wonky and turn the drive into a paperweight in 5 seconds, and the current crop of SSD controllers are still not showing signs of maturity.

[cteno4]

LOL martijn. the deathstar thing i think was an urban myth or someone just pissed at imb or there was one bad batch as in the early days as the ibm deskstars were the gold standard in long term reliability for heavy use systems. there were two lines a regular line and a premium, certified line that was more. i use to be ridiculed for spending 10-25% more for them, but i would always have the last laugh as my systems never had drive failures while all the other experts with the cheaper quantums, seagates and westerns were dealing with them constantly. i think it may have been a bit of job security on their part though! boss yells at the idea of spending the extra for better equipment and they say ok and then are assured of a job cleaning up for the next year.

 

i was bummed when ibm sold the hd line to hitachi, but hitachi seems to be keeping them quite good. ive stuck with them for like 15+ years and after a few dozen drives in my own systems and maybe 75 when doing work in the school, no major drive failures. i usually just retire the drives at 3-5 year mark just to be safe or usually because they have gotten too small by then, but a few have gone on for longer in systems ive given away in the past...

 

best of luck recovering bob. big children (ie read adults) with liquids should be kept away from computers as well. my new $9K macIIfx (luckily i paid half that on developer discount) had a whole cup of coffee sucked through it while on by an 'adult'. they just cleaned it up and never bothered to tell me it happened. i came in to find it rebooting itself every 15 seconds. luckily with a through cleaning all that got fried was the pram battery - was amazing, but i still get a sick feeling when i smell burned coffee as the whole underside of the mother board was covered in black gooey fried coffee...

 

cheers

 

jeff

[clem24]

tsk tsk to be running a business with no backup plan .. 

 

/jerk

 

You really should consider cloud computing or doing online backups instead of using media like blu-ray. Even my own personal computer, I do offsite backups of things that I do care about (although for me, email is not one of them). My offsite backup consists of a 1.5TB external drive that bring home every so often and then gets stored in my desk at my office all other times. As for email, you should also consider going to something web based and/or download to your computer but leaving a copy on your server. You should also consider making your main computer your in house server and using a workstation, especially considering you've got kids.

 

It's a lot of stuff to think about but the key is to really take advantage of the internet and what kind of services can be provided, as I think backing up to any kind of media is really a thing of the past. As for me, I do backups to disk because I am a.) cheap and b.) have a lot of data (mostly images), but then again, on that 2nd point, it's really only a one time dealy (just big the first time and relatively small everytime thereafter).

[Mudkip Orange]

Seagate was Maxtor.

 

The term "Maxtor click of death" entered our lexicon for a reason.

 

Note that if a company feels compelled to change its entire name and brand, without any commensurate product expansion, that may in fact be symbolic of something.

[cteno4]

actually they were competitors until seagate finally bought maxtor and kept the maxtor name as subsidiary as a line name. lots of promise in the early days with maxtor. we had a few early monsters on the sun stations at berkeley. they just never really delivered as time went on and downhill as they went mainstream.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Jeff, the desktop DeathStars definitely deserved their name, even if it was only 1 batch :) I had a few of them die on me before I moved first to seagate SCSI and later to Samsungs. Main reason I switched was because the IBMs were quite noisy at the time.

 

Nowadays I'm not that picky, but I still tend to go with Samsung.

 

Of course, I hardly ever use anything other than my Air these days, it's just a great little machine :)

[The_Ghan]

Back in the days of Pentium 90's and 100's I had a Digital P100 which I put a top-of-the-line Maxtor 5GB drive into.  I think I'm going back to about 1997.  The drive was awesome and never let me down.  My next PC was a 1GHz machine and I put an array of Cheetahs in it and set it up as a pure gaming machine.  I held a fortnightly boys night at home and we'd hook up our machines and play Duke Nukem 3D, Warcraft, Starcraft, Doom II, Quake, and my favourite - Unreal Tournament.  Not only did I have the fastest machine with the smoothest graphics, but the chattering noise of those three Cheetahs chattering away (they are freakin' noisy) was very distracting to my mates.  When they eventually caught up to me I moved that whole Cheetah setup across to a 3.06GHz ASUS platform and threw in a 500GB Samsung SATAII for data storage.  My friends were once again in awe.

 

These days my Acer Aspire 8920 18" notebook pulls better than that rig.  At work I have an array of 1T Samsungs.  They're very reliable.  As I'm an architect with staff using Revit, drawing files are frequently 50-100Mb in size.  We've moved across to 64bit hardware and software on a Gigabit network with a dedicated 24 port Netgear Prosafe switch.  We utilise a grandfather-father-son backup system and I simply swap the external 2.5" drives over at the end of the day and take one home in my pocket.  Backups are live and file-by-file.  The advantage of this over a disk image is the backup drive is ready-to-use and does not need to be restored onto a new system.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[Martijn Meerts]

I used to go for top of the line gaming stuff as well, until I started working at a place that used only Mac workstations. Got a Macbook Pro as a bonus for some side project I worked on in my spare time for the boss, and since I've been using Mac only.

 

When the last gaming PC I built was starting to get too slow, I replaced it with a Mac Pro. The gaming PC needed new stuff every 2-3 months to stay up to date, so the thing ended up costing about twice as much as a Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has received some extra RAM and a new graphics board because I messed up the old one ;)

 

 

Never did much backing up, but these days I have the Macs set up to use Time Machine, which makes backup up rather seamless. Just some initial setup and done. It's actually so seamless that I forget I have backups :)

 

 

(I'm not saying Macs are per definition better than the rest, just that I personally prefer them and the OS, and just can't be bothered building my own machines anymore)

[cteno4]

martijn,

 

when was that you had some go bad? just curious as ive used them for years and years and the few gurus i really trust in hardware i know swore by them! perhaps it was near the end when they were selling off all the hardware businesses as they seemed to want to get out of it all pretty quickly there!

 

glad you are loving the air. just waiting till i "have" to replace the laptop to go to the air. im hoping they beef up the video eventually as thats the only real thing that creates headaches for me...

 

ghan,

 

off site backup like that is such a must! cloud is easier, but if you have huge data it can be slow and expensive! the pocket net works great. i store my rotated backup drive in the car boot.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Jeff, was probably about 2 years or so before they sold their stuff, can't quite remember. It wasn't just me that had them break, some friends had the same problem.

[rpierce000]

I appreciate all of the "advice" I have recieved both directly and via this thread.

 

The drive was reguarly backed up, but somehow the .PST files failed to backup and THAT was not noticed. I think that because they are always "open" the program I was using would bypass them and still told me I had a successful backup. When I went back to the LOGS then I found the problem, but who reads the logs when the program says everything is OK? Nobody until there is a failure!

 

The .pst files are now on the server's RAID, 8 drive RAID5 with a hot spare. That should be safe enough, but I also bought a blu ray burner (for the business, honest...) so that we can get CRITICAL (read financial) data offsite. If mailing an occasional BluRay to Maryland from Washington State is not a distant enough backup plan, the disasters you are worrying about will remove the need for train distributors.

 

I now look forward to a discussion of RAID 5 vs RAID 10 and RAID 6. Oh yeah, I am running a 3ware controller for all of the Areca fans out there.

 

I eagerly await the continued advice of my older and wiser colleagues.

[The_Ghan]

OMG!  Am I older? ... or perhaps you were ignoring my advice and not referring to me a all ... 

 

PST files are a dog.  I can't understand Microsoft, really!  It is so easy to code in Excel, you can code in modules, workbooks, spreadsheets, even individual cells.  The Access GUI makes it damn near impossibly to code a decent front end to any database I might create.  There is always issues with graphics in grids, controls not being consistent across versions of Office and Windows and the like. 

 

Then there's Outlook ... which should be called LookOut ... or the full name of LookOut, You're Screwed!!!  Outlook is not easy to code in.  It is not easy to customise.  Adding code behind the custom fields and attempting to do anything logical with those fields is frequently a futile exercise.  It doesn't have the ease of use of Excel.  It doesn't use the Access Database format.  In fact, a PST file from Outlook is not even compatible with a similar file from Outlook Express.  The upshot of this is that there is no way to rescue a PST file.  Yet we all use Outlook.

 

We're a bunch of mugs!

 

I don't have any further advice on arrays.  In terms of hardware you probably don't even need 64bit and dedicated graphics cards like us.  For data and email based work 32bit PCs with graphics on the motherboard are fine. 

 

One extra thing we do is to take one of the Grandfather backups, usually do one at the end of the year, and take it out of service.  So, I technically have a record of the data drive at the end of every year since I started my practice. 

 

Another thing we do is copy our software DVDs onto the server and install from the server.  This has two benefits: the DVDs are also backed up on our backup drives, and when you install from the server you don't get asked to insert the DVD whenever you want to add one of the "extras".

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[clem24]

I eagerly await the continued advice of my older and wiser colleagues.

 

If there's one thing about technology.. It's the younger crowd you need to turn to!

[linkey]

I eagerly await the continued advice of my older and wiser colleagues.

 

If there's one thing about technology.. It's the younger crowd you need to turn to!

:P or those who still have contacts with either the computer companies or Uni/Colleges to get access to their new computer systems.

:D

[rpierce000]

If you believe you have an order in the pipeline from BT Trains and you have not heard from us last week, PLEASE contact me. We know of only one case where an order almost slipped between the cracks, but we were able to successfully complete it to the customer's delight.

 

Thank you for all who have already shopped the sale. If you have not yet taken advantage of it, I will not be holding another sale like this for quite a while, so dig in!

 

Bob

bob@bttrains.com