Linux mint 19 Tara

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Last week I had a disaster with my sheds PC. It was a Dell from 2004 32bit. On power up it started bleeping and the fan screaming away, within seconds a bang and lots of smoke. It was a catastrophic failure with three or four caps on the MB blown and other components cooked. I suspect a regulation issue in the PSU. The system was running Mint 18.3 Sylvia. It had two HDD's one the operating system, software and files the other just for back up use.
I had lots of scans and important paperwork on the PC and made regular backups, unfortunately when I removed the HDD and backup HDD neither would read onto my laptop. This was a disaster as I'm in the middle of a PIP claim and it has doctor reports and stuff about my heart condition and knee/spine problem. After a lot of time looking around I installed ddrescue and another Linux based HDD rescue program and fortunately every thing was saved to the laptop HDD on a separate partition.
I then bought a refurb PC from CPC for £99 a little Dell 720. It is a 64bit system and from what I can see has a new MB and HDD, its a 280gb drive but I had a new 500gb here for the old PC so as it was a SATA HDD it has been fitted. I installed the latest Mint Mate 19 Tara and did a back up of my restored files and software. I like the feel of the OS and the new PC felt quick but there were three things I found did not run. Virtual box would not install even though software manager reported it had, GQRX & Cubic SDR won't run either.
After a bit of searching and asking on Git Hub and Linux forums I have got VB and GQRX to run but CubicSdr still just sits with no spectrum analyser or sound.
I'll stick with Mint 19 and see if we can get a fix, it is only a couple of weeks old and far far more stable than Windows 10 was initially.
Glad now that I've got a PC up and running in the shed and important files were rescued.

[ppppenguin]

Always nasty when a computer fails badly. Fortunately you were able to recover the disk contents.

For those of you who don't, ALWAYS have up to date backups of important files on a physically separate device. I had a recent failure to boot and couldn't recover the C drive. My clone turned out to be unbootable. Ultimately it didn't matter as I did a clean instal of windows and other software. Slow but sure. All my own data is on a separate D drive but even if this had failed there would have been no problem. I do weekly clones of the D drive with Macrium Reflect plus daily incremental backups to a set of memory sticks. All backups are kept in my garage which is over 20m from the house.

So I'm protected against:
Fire (unless it's a neighbourhood wide disaster in which case I've got more to worry about)
Flood (the backups are about 2.5m off the ground and I live virtually on the top of a watershed)
Theft
Disk/PC failure
Malware*
Accidental file deletion or overwrite**

*To a reasonable extent. If something like Cryptolocker got into my system and had a delayed action then the backup clone HDD might also be infected. I keep 4 HDDs and use them in rotation to give enhanced protection

**The commonest failure! So long it's not on a file created that same day before the incremetal backup I can easily revert to the backed up version.

[Murphyv310]

Hi Jeffrey.
Fortunately the new PC has only space for one HDD so the backups now are done to an external drive, I've also kept the copy on my laptop which has a nice 1tb drive so plenty of room.
Just shows how a catastrophic failure and having a spare HDD fitted to the PC is a bad idea.

[ppppenguin]

As you have learned the hard way, keeping backups on the same machine or device is a very bad idea and gives a false sense of security. Fortuantely you were able to recover the lost data.

[BusyBee]

I am glad things are sorting themselves out, albeit slowly.

I had a fright a few weeks ago when my laptop failed in the middle of the April Windows update. I was lucky on two counts, as, although I had to effectively re-install Windows, my data was still there, and I had done a full backup a few days before. I like to keep two sets of backup as I have two external drives. Most of my data is downloaded so could be restored, but it is some years worth so would take days (at least). The biggest bind I found was re-installing applications. We do have an older Vista equipped desktop. I have now started experimenting with Linux (booting from memory stick), but have found that it would not be quite so easy to do with my more modern laptop.

Tracy

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
All sorted now with Mint 19, I had to add a Notification to a line of data for soapysdr RTL driver.
Looks like a good upgrade from 18.3.