So my computer crashed yesterday morning, and I lost EVERYTHING. so I need some help, if you lave links to other sites that you use as resorces, retailers, or just good genral railroading information, I would apprecate links to them here, so I can try to re acculminate my resorces again. also, a gentelman from the United Kingdom was e-mailing me back and forth about sharing and exchangine information on the prairie line, He to is modeling it, I lost your e-mail address and the link to his forums, so if you are here, please e-mail me again.
FWIW, just because your computer crashes, it doesn't mean you lose everything. If you have reinstalled you OS then yes it's probably gone. IF you have really important information you need to have you can install a second drive to load the OS onto and put your old drive in to access the old files. I would suggest taking the time to make two partitions on your hard drive. Put your OS on one (C and put all of your files on the other. That way if something happens to the OS you can reinstall without loosing your files. IF nothing else, maybe some people will go and back up their files after hearing this. Jason
I have a flash drive...I store my 'favorites' on it...and back em up monthly. Always adding new favs. BUT...to the original question...I have a long list of online train stores etc I would be happy to share with ya...to get ya started...drop me a PM...:tb-cool:
Every 3 months I make copies of all my files , each on a seperate CD , this way if a CD craps out , its only 1 file , not the whole shabang of 60 files or so .
A few times I rescue data from a harddrive using a Linux Live CD. By using that I've been able to copy from the harddrive to some othe disk on my network. Havn't tried to copy to a USB stick, but should work.
I back up my entire computer (26 GB), DAILY starting at 11pm, OFF PREMISES. Since only the changes are posted, it takes a few moments up to a few hours - but never beyond 5 am. The first back up took several days. How do I do this? On a remote computer - Online Backup, Data Backup & Remote Backup Solutions from Mozy.com – Welcome. Real peace of mind for $5 a month. I had to do a restore from it once. It cost $75 for overnight FedEx discs and EVERYTHING was there. A life saver.
Possible help I have never tried this before, but I just extracted my N scale Bookmarks from my BM file to a new BM file that has my N scale links, only. I am sending you a PM with that file attached. It is from Firefox. If you are using Internet Explorer, then do a Bookmark import from Netscape, if Firefox isn't listed in your Import Bookmarks options. I hope this works and helps.
another option is to store your bookmarks online. I use http://www.linkagogo.com/ to store mine. it's free and you can import/export to IE, firefox, etc... Plus, you can get to them anywhere, obviously
don't touch your computer ! there might still be data on your harddrive which might be saved ! you might consider getting software such as r-studio to try to recover your data.
I back up my files externally, each time there is some work saved. I download my bookmarks once each week. Boxcab E50
More about off-premise backup See my prior post, in this thread, about my backup method. In my 45 years as a managing IT person, I learned the hard way, ONCE. On-premises storage of backup can be a waste in the event of burglary, vandalism, fire or a natural disastrous event. After that one occurrence the back-up has ALWAYS left the premises, every day. To those of you who spoke of flash, USB, CD or other attachment methods of back-up, I hope that you have a way of distancing the backup from the physical proximity of the computer that is being backed up.
Ummmmmmmm...yup...flash goes where I go. Its on a lanyard that stays around my neck...never know when someone might need some of the programs etc i have on there.
I very much doubt you lost as much on that computer as you thought you might. As stated before, get a new hard drive (particularly if the old one was over 3 years old), load the operating system to it, and put the old hard drive in as a second, 'slave' drive. About 80% of the time you can see the old drive even if it isn't bootable. Copy information you need over to the new drive. There are also a lot of data recovery services out there for various prices, etc., depending on just how much you lost and how much you want/need to pay. But you'd be amazed how much is supposedly recoverable off a 'crashed' hard drive - if you're willing to pay.
I lost my motherboard three weeks ago and after of waiting a week for a new one, I screwed up installing XP for the new board. I thought I lost everything because I could not get any kind of response from the hard drive except for a blue screen. I bought another cheep hard drive and installed XP on it than hooked my old drive next to it. All of my stuff was still there and I got everything back, even my favorites. I have one file directory with all of my train stuff including my RTS8 program. I also have a 4GB flash drive with Windows Briefcase on it. I use it to keep an updated copy of my train stuff so that I can take to work with me. I can then work on Ideas I have at work during breaks. I’m not allowed to go on any forums at work, but I am allowed to check prices and availability of train stuff. I can even make purchases, but only during breaks.
Crash Update ok, so here is the new news, I did have some luck, I found a stack of CD's that were a back-up I did about a year ago when I did a system format and reload. so I only lost a few pictures, about 2 hours of music, and some software that I "tacticly aquired" from friends. I am still missing alot of my newer bookmarks though. I apprecate the all the sugestions, and I am definatly find some wat to do a back up somewhere that is updated frequently from now on for sure. I wish I could install a 2nd hard drive, but I use a laptop, so no room. so those of you that are curious, this is the story of what happened. I was checking my e-mail, and trying to delete unopened junk e-mail with outlook express. it refused to delete, then started giving me a error stating that their wasn't enought memory to delete. so I figured, empty the recycling bin, the deleted folder, and the temp files, that should free up some physcial memory, and "Kill some software with the 3 fingered salute" (I had a lot of junk that I didn't really use on my machine) so when to empty recycling, same error, deleted e-mails, same, no matter what I did, I got the same error. so I called my friend who is a IT manager up in the norther part of the state, he gave me the same old advice as always, restart. Guess what it did when I tried to do the shutdown? Yep Not enought memory to do this. so a hard reset had to be done. on a laptop, so I pulled the battery, and pulled the power. then restart, windows loads, then about the time the happy music plays and windows GUI loads, the damn thing resets. so I let it do that a few times, then reset it, and got the same results, used the manufactures "rescue disk" got the same results. so my friend said: "try to reinstall the OS only, that should fix it" so away I go. Now this is where I messed up, and my experence has made my mind up, I will NEVER buy a TOSHIBA laptop again. word of advice: Toshiba's "rescue" disk uses a program called "norton Ghost" to copy the files and install the OS. so here is the problem Ghost copys EVERYTHING including empty space. so if in effect copyed a new OS to my machine, then formatted the rest. once I figured this out, I called toshiba to find out if their was anything I could do, and got "it is not our problem anymore, your machine is too old (built in 2004)" answer from them, so needless to say I am done with them. so I called my IT friend again, he gave me the name of one of his coulegs in the area who he though might be able to recover something. He looked at it and ran a few programs using my HD as a slave in his machine, finding nothing at all, even after a few hours of messing with it. His exact descrription of what he found was it "was like looking at a HD out of a brand new machine. it was like a desert." this is when I gave up and decided to just deal with it and start over. reinstalling what I had, and finding the year old backup disks. software I got back: MSTS, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft streets and trips, some of my video game emmulators. Software I lost: Sony Sound forge, Microsoft Office (2005 edition) with Publisher, and some of other audio editing software stuff I used to make cell phone ring tones. well that is the story, so I guess I am going to have to just solder on and keep taking peoples information and advice.
performing backups on a weekly or monthly base is a good thing. unfortunately this might become time consuming and expensive. i do image backups (1:1 copies of harddrives) of all my 5 laptops and 4 pc once per month. all other data, especially that on my two 2tb nas are backed up to a san storage (thru fibre channel) every now and then. all in all i have roughly 4tb of data which needs to be backed up. way over 70'000 mp3 files, hundreds of downloaded movies, 250'000+ railroad pictures....... backing up this amount of data takes time, some planning and quite some storage capacity.
Hate to hear that you had a computer crash. Have been through that my self in years past. If nothing else, at least this thread is a good reminder to all of us to make sure we keep current back ups for just such issues. Good luck restoring everything.
The Toshiba Rescue Disk is actually a Ghost IMAGE of your entire Hard Drive as it was straight out of the box. Ghost copies that entire image back to the Hard Drive and in the process destroys everything in its path. If you had partitioned the Hard Drive as others have previously suggested, they would have been erased as well. A lot of Manufacturers only supply Images on Rescue Disks. Dell is the only manufacturer I know for certain who doesn't use Rescue Disk images; they supply customised OS disks - a full Windows OS disk that will only work on a Dell machine.
N-Jineer ... Dell OS disks are just rebranded Windows OEM copies they do not even install proprietary drivers. I have 4 Dells and 2 clones and in the past I have re-installed XP Home on a non-Dell system without problems. Delamaize, even Today Toshibas use a Ghost software re-install the software. I used to have crash problems, but I finally gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu on all my systems. The only one that does not have it is my fileserver, as I am too lazy to set up a Linux server lol I too learned the hard way 5 years ago to no longer trust systems after have a Fujitsu hard drive smoke in my system resulting in the loss of 20 gb of Data.
Drawmada; Sorry but the Dell OEM XP Professional SP2 disks supplied with all the PCs and Laptops in my schools DO install proprietary drivers, and that's been the case since the European Union started their Anti-Trust court case against Microsoft. Not that we have any use for them - we now blow away the hard drive and reinstall a Volume Licence version of XP Pro. Sorry to hear you got burned by the Fujitsu disaster - the City Council I was working for at the time got caught with 5,000+ of them; fortunately we got 98% exchanged before they failed.
