Cue Jaws Music - restoring System Image : III

» Tue May 22, 2012 5:50 am

Ok - this is a mild scream into the void - my modding PC has worked beautifully since I got it about a year or so ago - yesterday I noticed it was being a bit erratic so I ran the May Windows updates and now backups won't run - I've had crashes all day

Managed to move all my important modding files to an external hard-drive - fortunately my image backup is only a week old - still I've never had to restore from an image backup before so am nervously watching it over my shoulder as I type from my laptop

Sigh - I had just about finished another mod to release into the wild as well and have poured another 2 weeks work into my main WIP which I am worried I might lose

Guess I'm going to find out how good my backups really have been.

I know you guys can't do anything to help - but all sympathy and similar bad luck stories are appreciated

» Tue May 22, 2012 3:13 am

Couple of years ago due to scheduling I ended up doing the editing on my final second year degree project on my computer at home. Finished the edit after a day or two. Saved. Rendered. At about 90% completion the graphics card fried and I had a mad dash to reimport all the footage, edit, render in a day once I was able to get to an editing platform. On the plus side since I bought that computer whole from a company I got a free upgrade and replacement for the graphics card, motherboard and processor.

» Tue May 22, 2012 7:24 am

Here's a copy/paste of my story from the UMP/MPP bug report thread

And now for some bad news. As seems to happen around here, my HDD failed, near the end of February. I have only as of today gotten the computer back up and running. I am pretty sure the data is intact as I believe that the read/write head just won't move. I am going to shop around for data recovery. While I know it is expensive, I am determined to get the data back even though there shouldn't be anything of great importance on it. And it seems the only external I have is not turning on now either, which is just my luck. I swear that I have terrible luck. The external does have important things... Hopefully that is just a problem with the power supply...

In my defense, I know all about backing up regularly ( though I don't think I had backed-up my modding work onto the external ), but in my current position I am stuck using my girlfriend's computer, and while I have told her for a long time now to get new drives, it wasn't until I could tell they were failing that she finally began, but they failed before we could get the drives and transfer the data. It's not really entirely the fault of either of us I guess, but I don't think it would have happened if I had my computer with me. Not that any of that is really relevant, but that's how it is.

I still haven't looked into recovering it, but on the plus side, the external works, just the power cord is damaged. I didn't have much of anything in the way of mod work that didn't need to be redone anyway, but... but... my bug list...

I feel for you Illy, but at least you have a backup. Hope it works out well.

» Mon May 21, 2012 8:18 pm

I've been fortunate enough to have never lost any significant data; the only times I've had HDD failures so far, I have had redundant backups. Best of luck in getting everything running again.

» Tue May 22, 2012 12:18 am

Ouch! Sympathy and ice cream for you, Illy! :hugs:

What are you using for backup? I tried Norton years ago, but it was such a system hog I gave up and just use a Western Digital external drive lately. BTW, I've got my testing set up sorted and running. Got Dervera up to level 30, I just need to do a few more in-game missions and I'll go visit our friend in Ebonheart. I'll go into more detail at our secret rendezvous point. :ninja:

» Mon May 21, 2012 6:55 pm

Having to backup from an image isnt anything to worry about. As long as the hard drive you are using to replace the old one works, you are fine. Just dont try to use an image to restore to a different computer from the one it was made. Simply restroing to the same drive is easy. I have only had to do that once and it was more for convenience than really needed.

I back my computer up every couple months. I backup individual things more often than that if I have done alot of work on them; usually something like a week or a few days. The last hard drive I had fail was in fact my external backup drive. That got replaced quickly with one that seems to run alot more quiet and cooler. I have also started using a thumb drive as a secondary backup source for some of the more frequently used things.

» Tue May 22, 2012 9:47 am

Thanks team - I had never restored from an image before so was unsure of the unknown - I had just used the Win 7 standard tools for creating the image - it took about an hour or so to roll itself back and everything seems fine - I hardly lost anything - well anything important that I know of just yet

Am glad I had the image - still unsure why my PC spat the dummy at the win 7 update - I normally keep my modding PC offline so will just wait until the June patches roll around and update it then.

Thanks to those who stopped by and shared their horror, help or hints