My computer is still down, awaiting a cross-shipment from Asus on a new motherboard sometime today. Hopefully I’ll be up and running tonight, and can finally send out client invoices for November. I have some late nights ahead of me, as I’ll begin the process of catching up with current design projects running through the studio.
During my downtime, I’ve been able to get my KVM switch setup orchestrated. It was a mess, and took aprx. two hours to test, plug in, and arrange the cabling. Also, I’ve categorized this whole situation as a lessons learned. I’ve planned for hardrive failures, but never accounted for complete system failures in the past. Now, I’m able to still work somewhat efficiently with my old development computer, but the problem is that all my updated client data resides on that Raided drive. I can’t simply pop out that hardrive and put it in my old machine because of how Raid technology works. So I must patiently wait until my system is up and running again to access these files.
Just yesterday I purchased a Western Digital 160 GB external hardrive that runs via USB 2.0. From now on, every day @ 3am my projects will be automatically backed up on this external drive. If I have a system failure in the future, no sweat. I simply unplug the external drive from my main computer, plug it into my backup computer, hit #2 on the KVM switch, and wahlah – no downtime! I’m also going to burn backups on my DVD burner, but I’m still awaiting Dual layer DVD-RW’s to hit the shelves so I don’t have to cycle through a new DVD-RW every month. My client data exceeds normal DVD-R media capacity, reason being for purchasing the dual layer DVD burner from Sony a few months ago.
Ahh, isn’t technology fun?
