The reason I back up my data

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling, software

Yesterday was one of those days. I woke up and turned on my Vista powered computer and I saw a blue screen of death staring back at me. I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach, and I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty.

I rebooted the machine and was greeted with a no “no system disk found” error. Awesome.

After about 20 minutes messing around in the BIOS, switching drives, cables and power around, I concluded that the Boot drive of my computer was dead. The BIOS wouldn’t even see it at all. DEAD. KAPUT. FIN.

The drive that died was a Western Digital Raptor, 10000 RPM, 74 GB drive. It’s an expensive drive to replace so I’m glad is was covered under warranty.

For most people, losing a hard drive is a devastating experience. For me, its an inconvenience.

A little background. I build this computer in december of 2006 in preparation for windows vista. All the drives are SATA, and the system was designed with data back up and redundancy in mind, I’ve blogged about it has save my ass before.

The redundancy starts with the machines architecture:

The boot drive (C:) is a small, and fast drive. The operating system and applications are installed on this drive. No working data or documents are ever stored on this drive.

For data storage, I use 2 large drives mirrored together using raid 1. This means that the computer only sees one drive (D:), but all activity happens to both drives. If one of the drives crashes, the other one is there as an instant back up with no loss. Its an expensive solution backup, but is critical in my opinion. All data is stored here. I have the systems users file (my documents, etc) set to use this drive.

External Back Up Drive 1 (X:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every night at 3am, creating a recovery in case files get deleted from the data drive (D:) during the work day.

External Back Up Drive 2 (Y:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every third night at 5am. This acts as a recovery drive for D: and X:. Drive X: also backs up my iTunes Catalog every night

To top is all off, I use a service called carbonite to create a real time back up of my data over the internet. At $50 a year, its worth it. If my house burns down, or my equipment is stolen, no amount of drives will keep my data save. Off site is the way to go.

So yes, losing the system drive (C:) means I will have to reinstall the Operating System, and my applications, but at the same time, I haven’t lost anything except the time with will take to get things up and running again.

In the mean time I’m going to try and get apple OS X Leopard running on my PC!

iPhone Developer Network

By Josh Highland in internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling

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I have started a new site, iPhone Developer Network. The vision of the site is to create a place where people interested in creating iPhone applications can get together and share knowledge.

I actually started making posts back in August, but stopped shortly there after. With the looming release of the official iPhone SDK, I feel that its a good time to start getting the word out about the iPhone Developer Network.

Come join us!

A man and his devices

By Josh Highland in comic, funny, hardware, Josh's Rambling, semi-legal

I have known about the tv-b-gone for some time now. If you don’t, its basically a small device that will turn off any tv in a matter of seconds, from over 200 feet away.

Earlier this week I saw one of the coolest/most screwed up things I have seen in a while. One of the guys form gizmodo took a tv-b-gone device into CES (consumer electronics show in las vegas)and wrecked the place. Here is the video http://youtube.com/watch?v=ICpM3ItIhI0

After seeing it, I had to build one for myself. $20 and 4 days later I had the kit in hand. It took me a bit to make it, as I have never soldered anything this small. I got it put together, and it works. All the TVs die the second i press the on button and aim this thing.

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of my new best friends. Just holding it makes me want to go play some pranks! I will be posting some pictures and videos later on for sure.

UPDATE!
My favorite web comic, toothpaste for dinner recently ran this…
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Hacking an old iPod to get a new one

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, iPod, semi-legal, tutorials

A guy I know, “dave”, had an iPod that was acting up. On top of that, his warranty was was almost up, and he was worried that the iPod would live just long enough to go out of warranty before fully breaking, leaving him with out an iPod.

He was looking for a way help to speed up the failure process of his iPod, so he could make use of the warranty. Knowing that I have a back ground in working on the inside of iPods he hit me up for advice… advice that got him a new iPod

Based on the experiments and hundreds of comments I have received on my previous blog posts (here and here), its clear to see that when an iPod hard drive comes loose, the entire iPod goes nuts, and doesnt work (it cant read the music, so there is no music to play!).

  1. I suggested to Dave that he take a guitar pick (This is an old photo I am reusing where I used a screw driver for my example.. DONT USE A SCREW DRIVER you will scratch the metal part of the case!), and force the pick between the metal and the plastic, being careful not to scratch either surface.

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  2. Once the guitar pick (NOT SCREWDRIVER) is in between the case halves, twist the pick and move it slowly along the seam to release the internal latches. Take your time, so you don’t mark up the case, or Apple will know you were up to something.

  3. Once you get the case apart, be careful and move the case halves a part, keeping the plastic side down. Be sure not to break the ribbon cable joining the halves.


  4. Next, find the hard drive, it should be easy to see. At the top, it is attached with a large ribbon connection. This is where the magic happens! We need to unplug this cable from the drive, but still leave it semi attached. Pull the cable straight out, unhooking it completely. gently push it back on. enough to hold it in place, but not make a complete connection.

    We are trying to simulate what happens when some ipods are dropped. In some cases, the hard drive shifts and the cable becomes unplugged, creating a messed up iPod.

    To test this, gently pick up the iPod and press the scroll wheel. If you can see your songs, you pushed the cable back in to far, unhook it and try again. If you get an error, you did everything just right!

  5. To put it back together, flip the metal side over the top and gently squeeze it all together. The case will snap back into place.

  6. Your iPod should not play, and it looks completely broken.

If you return it to Apple under warranty, they should give you a new one. If they wont replace it, open it back up, re attach the hard drive cable and enjoy the dying days of your old iPod.

I haven’t tried doing this this, and I don’t really suggest doing it. I’m posting this for educational purposes, and because it is both an interesting hardware and social hack. I’m guessing that Apple might change their policy if they see a lot of this happening. You probably should just buy a new one. (I hope that covers me legally!)

While we are talking about iPods, subscribe to my podcast!