Martin Gordon's Blog

Since at least 10am EST today, email delivery of Google Groups posts seems to be down. The posts show up on the site but not in my inbox. I haven't seen anything on this out there yet except for a few posts on the Google Groups help site (with no replies yet) and one Tweet. This means that either no one uses Google Groups, no one cares, or no one has noticed; none of which really help me out.

BEGIN RANT

I think part of the reason Google is so profitable is that they don't have to manage giant call centers (or any call centers, for that matter). So while their products are generally reliable, there's no place I can go to get a quick answer when a problem does exist. Even a quick post on the Official Blog saying, "we know there's a problem and we're working on it" would give me more hope than a few unanswered posts on a group page (which is run on the service experiencing the problem).

END RANT

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Groups, reliability, email, outage

For the third year in a row, I've had a hard drive give me trouble during the month of October. In 2003, my iBook's hard drive failed and I got my new PowerBook. Recovering the data was tough, but in the end I got it all.

Last year, my PowerBook's hard drive was giving me an error similar to the one my iBook gave me. I purchased an external HD last year to use as a backup. I was able to format the internal drive and map out bad sectors, but till this day, I question the integrity of the data on this drive.

Just a couple of days ago, I had trouble browsing the contents of the drive; drectories would take a few seconds to show up. Then it stopped mounting after a restart. Disk Utility, if it didn't crash when searching for drives, wouldn't show volume names but instead would show the Unix device name, "disk2s9". TechTool, when it saw the drive, would report that its SMART status was okay. I was able to plug the drive into a PC and run Western Digital's diagnostics. The PC and diagnostics saw the drive and both basic and extended tests came back okay.

So up until a couple of hours (when I ran the diagnostic), I was scared that my backup drive was dead. Now, I'm pretty sure it's the enclosure (*phew*), but I'll have to try a new enclosure to be sure.

Yes, everyone says, "backup your data," but the new phrase should be "backup your backups." With recordable media having a shelf life of a couple of years and hard drives only having an operating life of around a year (or so has been my experience), where there hell are we supposed to keep data that we intend to keep for a long time?

Technorati Tags: hard drives, backup, storage, troubleshooting, western digital, external enclosure