Comments on: Saying Goodbye Is The Hardest Partition

By: abb3w

abb3w — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:08:06 +0000

Slightly more effective than a freezer is a cooler full of dry ice. The evaporated CO2 is denser than air, providing a better bernoulli effect.

By: santy

santy — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:13:55 +0000

What are they injecting the HD anyway in the 1st panel? Data? TuneUp Software? Also he speaks like an old man.

By: Vietor

Vietor — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:11:52 +0000

My company, Zettabyte Storage, makes a NAS that does automatic offsite replication of all data stored on it. You can use it to aggregate your Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups, to have another onsite copy as well as a complete offsite copy.

Get in touch with me through the name I’m posting with @ zettabytestorage.com , or through our website, and I’ll set you up with an evaluation unit if you are interested in giving it a try.

By: kevin royalty

kevin royalty — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:13:57 +0000

if no one has mentioned this yet, look into a home server. HP makes a home server that will accept your time machine mac backups just fine (and it will be automated!). the EX 48x models are what you want. $449 on amazon with free shipping. Enjoy!

By: MattG

MattG — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:19:02 +0000

You have a Mac. Use Time Machine, dude. Your backup will never be more than an hour old.

By: Shakey

Shakey — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:09:23 +0000

Mars server hosted by manhattan.net?

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:53:17 +0000

is there a slight dig in there at the last episode of heros?

By: Brandon

Brandon — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:02:03 +0000

In reply to scruff. Also, the top most set of binary is only 6 bits, not a full byte. Not sure if that was intentional or not.. but yeah, more 6's!

By: B. High

B. High — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:50:06 +0000

Another recommendation for Mozy. I use it on both computers at home, mostly to protect digital photos. It's inexpensive and works pretty well for easy off-site backups. I also use rsnapshot to make onsite backups to a server at home for faster restores.

The combination of onsite & automatic offsite backups means that I can be back up and running quickly in the case of a hardware failure, and feel relatively secure that my photos will be safe (although slower to recover) in the event of fire, burglary, flood or zombie attack at home.

By: UnderTheDark

UnderTheDark — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:19:00 +0000

In reply to UnderTheDark. Um, it's this Saturday. Somehow forgot to add that tidbit of info :S

By: UnderTheDark

UnderTheDark — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:17:35 +0000

I live in Austin, so there's no way I can go, but I know y'all are Dallas-adjacent:

Zeus Comics
4411 Lemmon Ave.
Dallas, TX 75219
(214) 219-TOYS
Email
Website
Scheduled Creator & Character Appearances
Zeus has ordered 4000 free comics for Free Comic Book Day. Our guests this year are:

Scott Kurtz (creator of PVP, Ding!, co-creator and writer of Truth, Justin and The American Way)
Matt Sturges (writer of House of Mystery, Blue Beetle, and Jack of Fables for DC/Vertigo Comics)
Kristian Donaldson (co-creator and artist of Supermarket, artist on DMZ, Chuck, and upcoming 99 Days)
James O'Barr (creator of The Crow, which was adapted into the hit blockbuster movie)

By: GBeans

GBeans — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:42:00 +0000

I hope you manage to recover or reform those strips eventually. I think you taught the rest of us a very valuable lesson. Christ, I haven't backed up my work in almost a year, even thought I own a portable HD. ..Which is half full of 1960's sci fi and nothing else.
Busy weekend ahead, I think.

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:47:40 +0000

In reply to Shane. Comic... :|

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:47:16 +0000

Best comment yet! 🙂

By: Dean

Dean — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:40:33 +0000

Love the art in this one. At least this experience gave you inspiration for a new comic, right? I'm not saying it was a good experience, but at least *something* good came from it.

By: Chris Fairfield

Chris Fairfield — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:08:05 +0000

Hmm, I guess if you smoosh the second and third line together you do get that. Now I'm going to have to start putting the lines together in all the different permutations to find the hidden message.

By: SeniorCitizen

SeniorCitizen — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:47:26 +0000

Next time, don't take the word of the Internet if stuff actually matters.
There are esoteric reasons for and cases in which the freezer procedure can work but unless you know exactly what happened in the drive, only do it if you don't care about the data.

If it doesn't matter ddrescue et al are just fine. Otherwise, don't power it the fuck up. 🙂 It might *only* be slamming the disk head against the rest position but what if it slices halfway across the top platter and tears off neat ridges whenever powered up?

In short: if it's important, when it dies, do not power it up and bring it to a professional (TM), 'cause you don't have a clean room yourself.

By: Shakey

Shakey — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:13:16 +0000

In reply to Llama_Bill.

A limited run of HE "inspirational" pieces in the style of http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/posters/32cc/…

3 phrases with a suitably garbaged comic set in a nice black background. Win!

By: ZPedro

ZPedro — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:52:57 +0000

In my not-so-humble opinion, backing up the original files should be done as part of the comic upload to the server procedure, just before it. That way, you can only lose work that has never been published, so it's "only" work time lost; otherwise, you have to redo something already published, which is a whole different ballgame. It's the same thing for us programmers: whenever we make a release (no matter how insignificant, to how many people, etc), we have the source code of that release under version control and possibly tagged (now, version control may be a bit overkill for digital media…)

From the patterns of the corruption it looks like the PSD image data is stored on disk as separate red, green and blue planes, and the corruptions are simply runs of a contant value in these planes (with a few exceptions). By cross-referencing with the high-resolution JPEGs (if you can recover them, as with all compressed data it's hard to recover it from corruption) you might be able to recover satisfying stuff.

Remember folks, hard drives are barely reliable enough to use as a component for the OS and applications to work from and a temporary scratchpad for any work, nothing more. Backup your shit on a server on Mars I tell you!

By: scruff

scruff — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:35:44 +0000

In reply to Chris Fairfield. 110110110 is 666 in binary...

By: Will

Will — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:53:57 +0000

For the cost of buying a bunch of new drives — you could'd paid for a years worth of completely automated offsite backups with any number of reliable providers.

Mozy is one – I personally use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 though.

It's just completely automated. No need to remember to backup after hitting save. It just happens. And if for whatever reason it doesn't happen (The Tubes are clogged) – it complains loudly enough that you'll notice.

By: Kaleb

Kaleb — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:48:57 +0000

Recently had a hard drive corruption. Ended up my Time Machine and SuperDuper backups were corrupt too. The only thing that saved the remainder of the files was Mozy. Took me about two weeks to get all my files found from my backups. Mozy is a great deal (under $5/month, especially if you look for a special offer). My only complaint is that it is SLOW to upload all your files to them. Took me another two weeks to get a full backup of my laptop once I got a new machine and everything restored. That being said, I did backup my entire home directory. It might be best for you to use if you're just backing up your important files

By: Chris Fairfield

Chris Fairfield — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:43:34 +0000

Those are random ones and zeros, aren't they? I probably shouldn't have set here for a minute seeing if they meant anything, eh?

By: Adam Hunter

Adam Hunter — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:29:45 +0000

Besides using a time machine (which you should) I highly recommend keeping a Git repository on your web server (or somewhere). Its very easy to setup and you can keep all your comic files in it. Once you make a comic you just type "git add . && git commit -m 'new comic' && git push" in terminal. Then bam! your comic is uploaded (and backed up) on your server.

By: David

David — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:01:30 +0000

Seriously, try SpinRite its saved my mom a court case and brought her HD back from the dead. It costs money but its worth it.

By: jenn

jenn — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:43:52 +0000

This comic is great and could have come right out of my brain! I lost my hdd at while working on my Master's Thesis. Luckily, I had also been working on it as school where I worked as a TA. Never got the hdd to work, though the tech guys I took it to did try to freeze it a few times to get data off of it.

By: michac

michac — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:01:44 +0000

Most of my coworkers use Mozy (http://mozy.com/) and are pretty happy with it. At least one of them has done a restore and said it was pretty painless.

By: the_stig

the_stig — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:47 +0000

Yup, HDD's suck for when they fail. Nice recovery comic Joel.

BTW, Solid State Drives (SSD) use flash storage (like an iPod Nano) and might be a good alternative. While they can fail, they will just be unable to write, you'd still be able to read everything just fine and transfer it. Small problem is they're super expensive.

By: el-b

el-b — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:42:48 +0000

i'll have to remember the freezing thing, i havent had a hard drive die yet, but i have had a computer almost melt.

By: Chris Fairfield

Chris Fairfield — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:39:05 +0000

In reply to Duder. He looks like "The Most Interesting Man in the World" from those Dos Equis ads. In my opinion, anyway.

By: Llama_Bill

Llama_Bill — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:53:59 +0000

Who is up for some limited edition glitchcore prints?

By: prufrock

prufrock — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:48:02 +0000

Time Machine. Saved my behind several times, once from a catastrophic HDD failure.

Super Duper is great, and all, especially for bootability — but Time Machine is essential for day-to-day.

Not over wireless, though. Never had good results with that.

By: Dai

Dai — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:40:10 +0000

Alrighty – you can get your actual subterranean cyborg-proof remote backup from Iron Mountain (yeah, those guys). They have a product called 'Connected Backup'. Imaginative.

By: Rhettigan

Rhettigan — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:56:23 +0000

been there done, that, my friend. fortunately, all I lost was a bunch of saved games (90% done with Psychonauts, a HL2 speed run, several level 20+ NWN characters, and more) and a notepad which had a few whiney and/or ponderous poetry and some addresses. i may have lost other stuff, too, but I don't know what I lost and I apparently haven't needed any of it!

By: Shiyiya

Shiyiya — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:48:45 +0000

I read 666 as 999 and didn't get it. And then I went, wait, ohhhhh.

By: Just Christine

Just Christine — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:46:10 +0000

Is that… bacon grease… in the IV? No WONDER you had drive failure.

By: Duder

Duder — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:45:28 +0000

Great art in this one.

Is the doctor anyone in particular? He looks familiar.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:35:28 +0000

i love the 666 mixed into the binary. great comic!