And The Data Goes Poof!

Remember the other day when I wrote about my network drive not working and that LaCie was sending me a new part to see if we could make an easy fix? Well the part came today and I made the replacement: no dice. Back on the phone with tech support.....

After a bit of a conversation and a few more quick tests, the tech guy determined that the unit was going to need to be sent in for work. The worst part: it was going to come back wiped clean of all my data. Thankfully, I've got a backup for this device so that data loss is minimal, mostly a week or two worth of podcasts I hadn't listened to yet; oh well. The bigger loss is my time, both in trouble-shooting this problem and in getting all the data restored once the device comes back.

Let this be an example and warning to all: you can never have too many back-ups! If you care about the data and consider it valuable and irreplaceable, do yourself a favor and invest in some kind of minimal backup. Get an external hard drive and a program like SuperDuper! so that you have at least one extra copy of your data if something goes wrong.

The level of ambition and redundancy in any given back-up scheme is a function of how paranoid you are about your data. For example, getting an external hard drive and making a copy of your computer's hard drive is great in that it provides a safe copy of your data when your hard drive dies (it will happen, sooner or later). But what about a fire? If the external hard drive is sitting right next to your computer, they both can get burned up. Or what about more global disasters like floods or tornados? Very quickly you can up end trying to manage multiple back-ups and keep everything sufficiently in sync. Even if the data is valuable, we all have a life to live and don't want to spend it messing with the tools we have for our convenience.

In our case, the back-up scheme isn't too crazy: the LaCie device has two hard drives in it that are always exact copies of each other. My first back-up rule of thumb is that any data worth having should exist on more than one physical drive because all hard drives will fail sooner or later. In the case of the LaCie device, two drives inside the device mean that I can put any data I like on that device and my data will be safe from a single drive failure. The data is not safe from theft of that device, fire, or failure. So, taking my paranoia to the next level, I have an external drive that I use to backup the LaCie on a semi-regular basis. The problem with "semi-regular" is that it happens when I feel like it and it is a pretty manual process. In this case, all the data that is lost will be from the last time I backed-up the LaCie a few weeks ago. Also, I use SuperDuper! to backup our household computers to the LaCie device every evening. So, as you can see, sadly, the bulk of my backing-up centered around this device that failed.

Lessons learned from all of this?

1. I don't think I'll be buying another LaCie product anytime soon. Technical support has been great but I have problems with the device everytime the power glitches and now this. I was hoping that by using a simple RAID 1 device data recovery would be easy and I wouldn't be dependent on a particular vendor for the safety of my data. It looks like that is not the case.
2. In an ideal world I'd replace the external hard drive I use to back-up the LaCie device with another LaCie device. I know this contradicts the above statement and we don't have the money for another external device so it isn't going to happen soon. A second device would have allowed me to removed the hard drives from the broken one and send it for service without any data loss (much less my time).
3. Off-site backup for valuable data is something we're looking into. We're looking into one now called Mozy. I haven't figured out what data we'd put up there but I'm thinking we're going to go for it. The big catch for us is that our upload speed is slow enough that it will literally take months for us to get all our valuable data uploaded. The good news is that once it is there, it should be safe from virtually all problems. This service is the last resort in case our house is destroyed; neither we nor it seem set-up for on-the-fly data recovery for a whole hard drive.
4. I'm looking into getting a cheap uninterruptible power supply for the LaCie device so that if our power does go out, I can shut the unit down safely and not have to mess with all the problems it has been giving me.

Today's Project

With all our non-working time off, Katie and I have been doing some home improvement stuff. Last night Katie changed the upholstery on dining room chairs to some cool micro-suede fake polyester leather stuff. They look and feel nice.

Today I installed a pulley system for getting our bikes in the garage off the floor. If you've ever seen ads for things like this (big hooks being more common) they usually feature an attractive women in "work-out clothes" one hand on the bicycle as if she had just hung it up. Two things: unless she is a lot stronger than she looks and/or the bicycle is a $4000 10 lb. bike, she did not just get done hanging it up with one hand. Two, often these photographs seem to be done in 12-foot garages where hanging the bike by the front tire places it completely out of the way.

Since neither of these facts apply to our garage situation, we grabbed a kit that makes a simple pulley system with lowering hooks to grab under the front handlebars and the seat. We've got two of them installed in such a way that the bikes are out of the way but we can still get them down easily enough. (We realized during the planning process that the bikes needed a place to "land" when we wanted them down. For example, though hanging them above the car would save space we would have to move the car every time we wanted them down. This definitely made finding a good spot a big more tricky.)

I wouldn't say that raising the bike is trivial with this system but it is possible for Katie to do it without too much effort. So far my only complaint is that the rope seems to tend to slide out of the grooves in the pulley when its not being loaded down. We'll see if this ends up being a pain over the long-term.

Photos

Over the past few weeks Katie and I took two trips: one was our "second honeymoon" (also known as "we're probably never going to be a position to do this again") trip to Hawai'i, the other a trip to Westcliffe, CO where Katie's parents recently purchased some land. Both trips were great and wonderful in different ways and I have photo's to share from them.

Except that when we got back from Colorado, the device I store my pictures on (a LaCie 2Big Network for those of you who may care) wasn't working. The power went out while we were gone and this device has always had trouble with power glitches. Usually I'm able to get it back up and running with only a minor amount of effort but this time it looks to be more serious. I called tech support and we're slowly working on a solution (parts are being shipped to me right now). In the mean time, my pictures are locked up and unavailable which means I can't share them with you; you'll just have to wait.

(As you'll probably realize, I haven't updated my Flick'r stream in quite some time. This is keeping in par with the frequency of my posts here, only worse. What can I say? I have no excuse.)

In Last Week's Episode...(Or What I've Been Up To In The Past Few Months)

I once again have very little excuse for not being more active in my blogging. In this case, quite a bit has happened since I last wrote.

As of August 7th, I will no longer be an employee of Cessna Aircraft Company. Due to a federal law, Cessna has to give 60 days notice when laying-off 500 people or more and I was given my notice on June 5th. I am doing my best to not take it personally but this is a bit difficult as I was one of seven in our group of 40 or so that were chosen for this first round to really affect our group. As the company is doing very poorly financially and seems to be in survival mode, I didn't necessarily expect to avoid the lay-offs completely but I had hope. I viewed myself as a valued employee who had made a lot of significant contributions to the project I was working on and seemed to have a good skillset. I didn't consider myself one of the most valued employees but I hoped I was in the top 35% in my group. To find out I was in the bottom 17% is unsettling to say the least.

I don't know why I was specifically laid off. At the group meeting days before the notices went out our boss told us the factors involved in assessing and ranking the individuals in our group, things like attitude, technical skills, professionalism, etc. Noticeably absent from the list were things like salary, years of experience and current project. I honestly can't imagine how I could have ranked so poorly by the official standards that I would end up at the bottom of the list. When I told my co-workers I had been laid off (minutes before walking out the door for the last time), I could tell they were just as surprised as I was. Everybody's best guess is that, despite the official ranking criteria, the reason for me being laid-off has something to do with working half-time and pursuing a Master's. I don't know why developing my technical skills would be perceived as a liability but it may have been.

So what's next for me? Well, I still have two more classes in the fall and a thesis to finish up before I complete my Master's. I had a great idea for a thesis related to my project at work that is probably not an option now; back to square one at this point. After that, its hard to say. I may end up pursuing a PhD at Wichita State or at another institution and depending on how long my thesis takes, that could happen as soon as the spring or fall 2010. Katie and I are still discussing all of this because we'd like to start a family sometime before I would finish my PhD (since that would be in ~2014) but if she's going to be providing the income for us, she can't be a full-time mom as well. There are a number of options, we just need to figure out which one is best or most feasible for us.

In the mean time, I've been plenty busy with around-the-house projects. We might install an attic fan, maybe a skylight, probably replace our front door. (I may have not made it clear above but as of right now, I am still technically a Cessna employee and will be until Aug. 7th. I am still getting paid by them but, again, for reasons I don't understand, they would rather not have me around at work and have asked me not to come back.) I've got plenty of time to think and pray over my future and have also been doing just that.