Author Topic: Old hard drives  (Read 4945 times)

Offline Mart 'n' Al

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #18 on: Tuesday 08 May 18 11:38 BST (UK) »
I read that as motherinlaw the first time!  Give more details, there are some clever people here.  I can't help, my knowledge is only software.

Martin

Offline cristeen

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #19 on: Tuesday 08 May 18 11:59 BST (UK) »
Haha, thank you Martin :) Apparently a capacitor was blowing on the motherboard. I have purchased a new system, getting to grips with Windows 10 and resolving software compatibility issues as I go along. I am a bit of a dinosaur/cheapskate and had stuck with 2007 or 2010 Word & Excel, most of my business data is rescued but my FH word documents have info in text boxes and pedigrees created with hierarchy inserts which now don't show. I also lost my ancient PAF programme, I have downloaded the basic Ancestral Quest as an alternative to that. Many of the programs we had were installed free when our children were students, no whistles and bells but more than adequate for my purposes. All data was backed up to external drives so most is retrievable I hope. My old computer is here until I know for sure it is not going to be required!
Christine
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Offline Mart 'n' Al

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #20 on: Tuesday 08 May 18 12:32 BST (UK) »
I am sorry to hear of your loss.  (Data, not mother-in-law).
Sadly I spent most of my career frightening people into doing backups.  There is a very good tutorial here, "Back Up Your Data Now or Cry - James Tanner"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxD_EGhjKKI

He is a very good speaker, much better than the Ancestry Shrieky Woman.

My woodwork teacher used to warn us that the one time we put our hand in front of the chisel would be the time it slipped into the hand.  I echo him, the one day you don't do your backup is the day your drive will fail.

Martin

Offline cristeen

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #21 on: Tuesday 08 May 18 12:40 BST (UK) »
My old computer was set to backup weekly. Unfortunately in the last few months of it's life it crashed continuously during backup & during it's last days went into a system repair loop and then an image restore from Feb 2018. I have lost everything from the last few months that was on the main hard drive, if that makes sense. I am one of those dangerous people who understands less than half of the IT I should!
Thank you for your sympathy :)
Newson, Steavenson, Walker, Taylor, Dobson, Gardner, Clark, Wilson, Smith, Crossland, Goldfinch, Burnett, Hebdon, Peers, Strother, Askew, Bower, Beckwith, Patton, White, Turner, Nelson, Gilpin, Tomlinson, Thompson, Spedding, Wilkes, Carr, Butterfield, Ormandy, Wilkinson, Cocking, Glover, Pennington, Bowker, Kitching, Langhorn, Haworth, Kirkham.


Offline Mart 'n' Al

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #22 on: Tuesday 08 May 18 14:22 BST (UK) »
You aren't dangerous.  I just feel sad for people that lose data.   (i learned the hard way, doing a com pany-wide software upgrade, but chose install, rather than reinstall....  I was 6 weeks into a new job, and had people in tears on the Monday morning.  34 years ago and it still haunts me.  I ran the whole IT department on a 29Mb hard disk. 

Martin

Offline 3sillydogs

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #23 on: Wednesday 09 May 18 12:17 BST (UK) »
Whenever I buy a new replacement computer (from my local computer shop), they always give me the old hard drive, though I'm never sure what I am supposed to do with it,

Is there some connector that I can buy to read stuff off the old drive, just in case ...?


My son has a gadget, I think it's called a Docking Station, he inserts the hard drive into it and it connects to his pc.  He uses it often to recover or transfer data for clients either onto storage device or to a new machine. It takes any hard drive even those from laptops.

I make sure that my data is always backed up after my hard drive crashed and I lost months worth of research and documents. I back up to the Cloud and my pc is set to do it automatically. External storage devices are also suseptible, as mentioned, to crashing when you least expect it.
Paylet, Pallatt, Morris (Russia, UK) Burke, Hillery, Page, Rumsey, Stevens, Tyne/Thynne(UK)  Landman, van Rooyen, Tyne, Stevens, Rumsey, Visagie, Nell (South Africa)

Offline cristeen

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #24 on: Wednesday 09 May 18 13:53 BST (UK) »
I can now breath again! I took a risk & bought a used Office 2007 from Ebay, seems to have installed fine & I can now access all my genealogy documents and some important saved emails. I will now be dealing with disposing of the old hard drive safely. Happy days :)
Newson, Steavenson, Walker, Taylor, Dobson, Gardner, Clark, Wilson, Smith, Crossland, Goldfinch, Burnett, Hebdon, Peers, Strother, Askew, Bower, Beckwith, Patton, White, Turner, Nelson, Gilpin, Tomlinson, Thompson, Spedding, Wilkes, Carr, Butterfield, Ormandy, Wilkinson, Cocking, Glover, Pennington, Bowker, Kitching, Langhorn, Haworth, Kirkham.

Offline greenrig

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #25 on: Thursday 10 May 18 10:53 BST (UK) »
"Used Office 2007 from eBay...".    I'm sure you'll be fine with this. But, as a warning to others, I got burned a few months ago.  The Office download went fine (it was MS Office 2010 actually), and the eBay seller sent me a licence key - and it all worked fine.

EXCEPT, after one month, the licence key expired.......   It was some kind of trial, or demo version. I never heard from the seller again, and never got my money back (only £10 - but a good lesson).

BTW - I think Office 2007 is out of support- which is why I went for 2010...
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Offline Mart 'n' Al

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Re: Old hard drives
« Reply #26 on: Thursday 10 May 18 12:38 BST (UK) »
Periodically check that your backup data is readable. During my working life I came across several people who were making backups without realising that they were corrupted.

Martin