By Peter Cochrane, 1 September 2005 15:25
COMMENT Written from Martlesham, Suffolk via free domestic Wi-Fi
Because of the life I lead, the nature of my business and an extensive travel schedule, all my equipment takes quite a trashing. My laptop in particular is continually in and out of my bag, being vibrated on the floor, tables and luggage racks in cars, trains and planes.
But even worse, it seems, it is continually being plugged in and out and, as a result, connector failure is a key life-limiting feature. Batteries and hard drives can be replaced at minimal cost but a failed port usually dictates a new and really expensive motherboard. So I have taken to routinely replacing and upgrading my machine every 12 to 18 months. Practical experience says they just won't make two years and beyond!
In past years I have seen the failure of a power connector due to cracked solder brought on by the stress of repeated plug ups, a touch pad mouse spring snap due to me dropping a laptop on my foot, and a VGA port failure that could not be located.
A few weeks ago my LAN (RG45) port/socket failed, and despite all my efforts I have not been able to diagnose the precise problem. So for several weeks I have been confined to Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, USB and FireWire working. To get a repair in progress I purchased a standby machine and moved all my files over. Today I just received an estimate for repair at 60 per cent of the new machine purchase price. Why so high? Diagnosis and repair is not what it used to be - and the replacement of any component on the motherboard is now beyond the visual acuity and manual dexterity of any human.
My decision is a simple one. I will pay four per cent of the purchase price of the machine to get it back from the repair centre, and relegate it to light duties! The last time I had a really severe problem on this scale it was a full hard drive failure. That really taught me a valuable lesson about the necessity for a full back up regime. Since that event it has been my practice to travel with a pocket drive replica of my main hard drive that I update regularly. Now here comes the crunch! The cost of a laptop may seem high, and the repair estimate out of all proportion but what really hurts is the down time, followed by the total rebuild of the disk.
Despite all my efforts I have been unable to find a full hard-drive back-up software application that will take the entire OS, apps, preferences, account details and settings. It just doesn't seem to exist. Getting my 60GB of files moved over is no problem; it is just drag, drop, and wait for a while. The rest is just plain torture, and the only upside is the joy of a clean new build!
What I need is a disk cloner that works and not a simple file and documents back-up system but so far I have failed to find one. It seems those addressing the need start from the assumption that all hardware is working, when in a lot of cases it isn't or it is partially disabled. There was such a package once called Carbon Copy Clover but it was shareware and not from a professionally recognised source, and it is now no longer current.
As far as I can see, the back-up packages produced by industry assume ideal conditions where all hardware is operational, a big fat LAN is available, and an infinity of disk space is to hand. In reality this is seldom the case when you have an emergency on the road! And as for the interfaces - confusing or what! I have seen people wipe their hard drives because the instructions have not been clear, nor the GUI intuitive and positive.
For the time being it looks as though I, along with countless other road warriors, will have to continue suffering the delays of manual back-up, reload and rebuild. I just don't see anyone in industry addressing this problem effectively for the rapidly growing band of IT self-sufficient travellers.
Comments
There are 19 comments. Join the discussion
1. Antony Norris
Have you looked at Symantec Ghost, a popular choice for complete hard drive duplication. Although any solution might have problems with different laptops due to driver incompatibilities.
2. anonymous
I use acronis trueimage just for this purpose, it backs up the whole drive to my LAN drive, once a week automated in the background without needing any intervention, restoration is a doddle, you can even clone onto a spare hard drive if you need to take resilience on the road with you, it can manage many other things besides, Boots to restore effortlessly from a CD.
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
3. Neil T
Peter,
Carbon Copy Cloner still works well for Macs: I use it to backup my disk to my iPod. Since OSX supports firewire booting, I can boot with my iPod, fire it up and restore it to the main disk, if needed.
For my wife's PC I use an old copy of Norton (now, Symantec) Ghost. It creates a compressed image of your drive, and the app itself can fit on a floppy (so, any memory device, basically).
4. Peter Cochrane
I would, but I refuse to use Windows!
Thanks for the suggestion though
5. Peter Cochrane
Thanks for the tip - but I don't use windows and it still has quite a few features midssing that I need.
6. anonymous
Power failure with your laptop... sounds familiar I just podcast about this very subject tonight. I'm glad you have been speaking out about this becuase it's abou time laptop manufacturers made changes to the design.
I have tried to fix the laptop myself but it's almost impossible to get a good view of the broken or worn components in the power connector.
I'm looking forward to when battery power will all day so we don't have to be tethered to the nearest wall socket.
7. Tim
One day soon you will be able to power laptops via the LAN hence one less port to fail - but it may be a while before you can power it wirelessly!
(RG45 heh heh what's that, a new one on me!)
8. anonymous
Power connectors inside laptops doo seem appalingly fragile and prone to fatigue failure. Is it impossible to design something more robust? For that matter can technology not give us something more sophisticated than the interference fit male-female power connectors?
I was going to question the sense of not having an extended warranty to cover against hardware failure. Then I remembered the 3 weeks it took for one hardware supplier to send someone (who failed to fix the problem) despite paying for next business day fix cover. Buying a new laptop and getting it set up would have been quicker and easier.
9. John Scott
What we need is a proper split between OS, applications and data. Just back up applications and data. Your next PC will come with the OS installed (preferably in ROM), and all you need to do is copy over your data and applications. There you are, ready to go!
This won't happen until OS and application development is split up within Microsoft (so don't hold your breath).
10. Andy Greenwood
Hi Peter,
I too used to use Carbon Copy Cloner but I now use an app. which I got off a cover CD of Macuser, called Personal Backup X which happily clones my HD to an external Firewire drive at the click of one button. Though (touch wood) I've never had to boot from the FW drive in anger, I believe it should be a perfect working clone. It has saved my bacon many times by supplying back-ups of corrupted or trashed files. Hope this helps.
BTW I thoroughly enjoy you articles and your blog. Many thanks.
11. Simon
Not using Windows, oh yes, I remember you've got some taste ;-)
IIRC you use a Mac, in which case I recommend Retrospect which I've used for years - it is perfectly capable of of keeping a second copy in sync with the main disk. I can't remember if the copy disk can be bootable or not, it's not something I've ever tried.
For Linux, then have a look at rsync, which is designed specifically for syncronising two filesystems.
Either will allow you to keep you portable disk up to date, and also seperate backups to be left at home.
12. Steve
Peter, the only solution to your problems is to find an experienced, self-employed IT technician who you can call on to carry out any cloning, data transfers or rebuilds that need doing. Such people have been known to work overnight and at weekends when their client is in a high-pressure, deadline driven field like investment banking, visual media, journalism, politics etc. and their advantage is that they have the hands-on experience (and the software tools) to get you up and running as quickly as possible.
13. John Sniadowski
How about Linux.
Create a bootable Linux CD with just enough bits on there to get it booted with a utility called dd and whatever you need to support your external storage device
You boot your machine from the Linux CD
Your main disk drive will be available as say /dev/hda (it will vary according to your hardware) and your say usb drive will be available as say /dev/sda.
To copy your entire notebook harddrive issue the command
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda
and hey presto - everything is copied over
to restore onto a new drive do the opposite
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda
Works a treat
OK I know Linux devices are a pain but once you've figured out what your hardware presents then its easy for a man of your caliber :-)
14. Laurence Cook
In all the 20 odd years of using a laptop, I have never known the power connector on the motherboard to fail. The adapter went once or twice, but this is not a significant problem.
Never used a Mac laptop, though.
15. anonymous
There's a quick and dirty way to make a disk image in unix/linux.
Boot into single user mode or off CDROM so nothing is mounted read/write.
fsck your partitions.
copy your working partitions (/, /boot, /var, and /home) to the scratch partition... e.g.
bzip2 < /dev/hda1 > /mnt/scratch/root-backup.bz2
16. Brian Milnes
From memory, RSYNC is a Linux based Open Source programme that allows incremental remote backup.
You create an initial drive image whilst at the office, and then perform scheduled or ad-hoc incremental backups.
RSYNC was devised for remote office backups, but there's no particular reason that you couldn't do your incrementals from your laptop whilst, say, at a hotel or other WiFi hotspot.
17. anonymous
What about "Bounceback Professional" together with ABSPlus from CMS products. I have no experience on a MAC, but works well on Windows. Does what it says on the tin. Size of drive = 60Gb
To quote their web site:
Upon initial connection, the ABSplus BounceBack® Professional software makes a complete backup of all files, applications, and operating system on your Mac to the ABSplus drive. This creates a bootable ABSplus!
18. Gordon Insley
Go out and find an old copy of Power Quests (now a Symantec company) 'Drive Image' V3.0. Old version runs from a DOS boot diskette in memory so has no relevance to needing Msoft Windows and will replicate a complete mirror image of whatever is on your drive on a second back-up HDD. I believe that you can create a similar disk from later versions too.If the primary drive corrupts then slot in the back-up drive and carry on where you left off and fix the other later . If the primary drive grinds into oblivion bin it and insert the back-up and buy another HDD.
80GB Hitachi (the best) laptop HDD is about £80.
No more stress......It works every time.
Good luck.
19. Alan Reid
Peter,
I estimate Laptops in real world situations last about one year, hardest is air travel. In and out of the laptop bags, through scanners, stood on or crushed by other passengers cabin luggage. 5 Laptops in 5 years, and I estimate a week of faffing about transferring apps, settings and files each time. No solution just costs!