News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

July 29, 2010

EMT

Filed under: Family Updates — Daryl @ 10:26 am

We have an Emergency Medical Technician in the family.

Derek has been studying to become an EMT, and finally took the National Certification Test on Saturday. He passed, and yesterday received his certificate.

The final step before he can actually work is to register with the state and get a license. It may take a few days because they do a background check. Once that’s done he can start applying for a job.

EMTs work in many different places. The first ones that come to mind are a hospital ER and an ambulance or rescue vehicle, but EMTs are also hired to work in casinos, schools, large companies, and sporting events, among other things.

Derek’s not sure in which area he wants to work; they all have advantages and disadvantages. It may come down to who’s hiring.

July 21, 2010

Where would I be without Mozy?

Filed under: Computers, Tech & Science — Daryl @ 9:55 pm

My wonderful new Windows 7 computer crashed today. I’m not sure what happened, but I think one drive of my Software RAID setup started to fail, and instead of using the good drive to keep things correct, it used the failed drive and started trying to match the good drive to the failed one. All I know is that I have two supposedly mirrored drives that are quite different,and neither one has many of my important files. Windows will barely boot, many things don’t work, and it says it is not a “Genuine” copy.

What a mess! I’m going to have to wipe and reinstall. This time I’m going to use hardware RAID — it’s built into the motherboard, so it shouldn’t be hard.

Meanwhile, in the corruption, most of my data files are gone from both hard drives. All my Thunderbird email files, and most critically all my C++ files that I have spent thousands of hours creating.

Fortunately I set up a Mozy account a few months ago, and it is going to save my sanity.

Mozy is an online back-up utility. Every night around 2:00am all of the important, impossible to replace, files get backed up to Mozy’s server. I have about 26GB up there right now, and when I just checked, all those critical files I was so worried about are as fresh as last night.

Boy I thought that setting up a RAID 1 mirrored system would prevent data loss. It looks like in this case it just made it worse. Hopefully the next time, with hardware RAID, it will do better. But in any event I will continue to use Mozy.

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