Alas, last Friday the hard drive crashed on my Windows 2000 Bruker installation.
I guess it was just a matter of time before I ran the gauntlet on this one. I
can now attest to the fact that (a) it really pays to do backups of critical
files, and (b) it pays to take good notes, and (c) even if you do that, don't be
surprised if this takes a day out of your life.
(a) I had backups of the entire C:\Bruker directory from a couple of months ago,
the C:\olenmr directory (my supplemental code for XWIN-NMR that allows for
remote web-based access), and the C:\export directory that serves as the web site.
(b) I had detailed notes documenting my past work during installation and
modifications.
(c) Starting at about 11 AM with a clean Windows 2000 system I did the standard
install of Mozilla, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Windows IIS web server, an
X-Windows client, and XWin-NMR (my thanks to Allen Wan at Bruker for promptly
sending a new license file), overlaid my backup of c:\bruker, added c:\olenmr
and c:\export, and did a new gradient shim. I counted, in all, 35 individual
steps. By 11 PM (I did get dinner), amazingly, we were completely back on line.
In a certain perverse way, I'm glad I had the opportunity to see for myself that
the modifications I've made to the Bruker files to make this instrument so
accessible to undergraduates really ARE pretty straightforward for anyone to
implement. Hey, if I can do it from scratch, you can, too! It was fun to start
up XWIN-NMR in its "native" state, then run my "replace.cmd" file and see it all
suddenly become "mine" again.
Most of our student data is gone, because that I don't back that up. (Hey, I'm a
professor, not a dedicated full-time NMR staff person, you know! The advantage
there, of course, is that no one can get mad at me for not "doing my job.")
Interestingly, this barely slowed us down. Although the instrument was down for
three days, all the week's samples were still in the BACS-120 sample changer.
Students just got the word and resubmitted their jobs. No big deal, since they
could do this from anywhere on campus any time. I look on the logs and see that,
sure enough, after sending out my "all-clear" Email at 11:30 PM, it took only
about 30 minutes for a student to resubmit their job from their dorm: "Job 11392
submitted by OleNMR-S 3/17/2004 12:21:19 AM." By the end of Wednesday, the
backlog was cleared.
So I couldn't be happier about how this remote web-access OleNMR system has
worked out (if I do say so myself). Thanks again to Clemens Anklin at Bruker for
assuring me back in 2002 that it MIGHT be able to be done. Now I know that not
only does it work, but it's a piece of cake to install. What fun!
My questions now are these:
What exactly do those of you who use a Windows system do for backups?
Do you, for example, have a system that automatically writes to two hard drives
so that you never have to fool with it? Do you use scheduled tasks to
periodically dump data, system, or data and system files to some storage device?
If so, how often do you do this? What sort of device and software are involved?
What are my options here?
Thanks, hope to see you all at ENC,
Bob Hanson
--
Robert M. Hanson, hansonr_at_stolaf.edu, 507-646-3107
Professor of Chemistry, St. Olaf College
1520 St. Olaf Ave., Northfield, MN 55057
mailto:hansonr_at_stolaf.edu
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
Received on Fri Mar 19 2004 - 16:34:14 MST