Sage just died on me.

[TallMomof2]

My main backup is Carbonite. I back up data only since I've also been burned by Ghost (and various other Norton/Symantec products). I do backup onsite to an external hard drive but only critical data files. Carbonite gets everything.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

My main backup is Carbonite. I back up data only since I've also been burned by Ghost (and various other Norton/Symantec products). I do backup onsite to an external hard drive but only critical data files. Carbonite gets everything.

Which version of Ghost? Where the image files on optical media or a hard drive?

Dave

[TallMomof2]

It was many versions ago (maybe 2.0 or 3.0) and I was imaging to another hard drive. I never had any luck with imaging to media but imaging to a hard drive worked sometimes. For me regularly backing up my data works best. Sure it takes longer to reinstall OS and software but I keep the OS and software in one partion and data in another partition. Data and key software files are backed up locally every night. Carbonite continuously backs up my data and other files/folders. I've done this for several years and this works the best for my set-up.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

It was many versions ago (maybe 2.0 or 3.0) and I was imaging to another hard drive. I never had any luck with imaging to media but imaging to a hard drive worked sometimes. For me regularly backing up my data works best. Sure it takes longer to reinstall OS and software but I keep the OS and software in one partion and data in another partition. Data and key software files are backed up locally every night. Carbonite continuously backs up my data and other files/folders. I've done this for several years and this works the best for my set-up.

I agree that Ghost was not reliable back then, years ago. Ghost has drastically improved from version 7 onward. The recoveries are reliable as long as you stored the images on a hard drive for long term recoveries, or use optical media for the short term, such as cloning computers. It's been years since I had an imaging recovery fail, except if the imaging file is bad. I had a recovery failure a couple of years ago. I verified the image file segments, and one segment failed the checksum. I transferred the same image file segment across the WAN again, the checksum passed, and the image restored successfully. We test image recoveries, using test recovery servers quite a bit at work to make sure the images are reliable.

I think if you try imaging products again, you'll find they are reliable now. You might consider using one of the free products. It will give you another method of recovering, and the only cost will be the disk space to store the image files.

Dave

[stevech]

It may be that freeware disk backups are reliable. But with Acronis at it's low sales prices (newegg, Frys) it's a bit of worthwhile insurance for my cloning and imaging.

I would never use an on-line backups like Carbonite becuase (a) it doesn't give me the fast-repair time that a clone or image does, and I just don't trust that these outfits will protect my data, and that they will exist a year from now. My off-site (disaster/theft) backup of key files is via encrypted media that I own.

[robogeek]

Back onto the original subject....Just thought I'd throw this out here for lovingHDTV...

I had these exact same symptoms last week after rearranging my hard drives around and creating a RAID 5 array for my DVDs, MP3s, and photos. I had my SageTV server lockup on me. After rebooting, I experienced the exact same symptoms you described. Upon reboot, my SageTV service failed to start completely and was stuck in limbo somewhere between Stopped and Started. The Windows Service control panel wouldn't let me stop the service because it wasn't fully started and it wouldn't let me disable it because it was in the process of being started. And the SageTV Service Control application froze up when trying to stop or disable the service while it was in this limbo state.

Without going into a long-winded story, the short story is one of my two recording hard drives had failed. Double check the SMART info of your hard drives with a program like SpeedFan and be sure your hard drive cables are secure. I've had issues in the past using those round extra long PATA IDE cables...because the cable is rounded and because of their length (greater than 18") I would see lots of non-failure related SMART errors in SpeedFan because the longer cables are more susceptible to cross-talk and interference. And with SATA cables, I've had problems with poor SATA connectors causing drives to randomly drop out on me.

The long-winded story is...It all started after adding and rearranging hard drives and the files stored on those hard drives in my SageTV server. I shut down my SageTVService, copied recordings from a 300GB recording drive to a 500GB drive with same directory structure, and reset the drive letters and UNC shares so the changes would be transparent to SageTV. Then I completely shut down the server, removed the 300GB hard drive I no longer needed in there, and turned the server back on. All was well for for a couple of hours...then a few seconds into a recording, the server completely locked up. Haven't had that happen in a long time. Not sure what was going on, so I hit the reset button to restart the server. Once booted, the SageTV service failed to completely start. Did the same thing you did, tried to stop and disable the service but couldn't, made copies of my SageTV properties and wiz.* files, and replaced the wiz.bin with wiz.bak and tried to restart again. Once rebooted, it did the same thing. But this time, while rebooting, I noticed SMART info was not being shown in the BIOS boot screen for one of the three SMART enabled drives plugged into the motherboard. So then I checked the drive in Windows Explorer and it was still there, so I checked it with SpeedFan to see if it would show any SMART info. No dice. Downloaded SeaTools from the Seagate web site and it too failed when trying to get SMART info off the drive. I rechecked Windows Explorer and after poking around the recordings directory it appears that I can still read some data from the drive, but writing to the drive now causes issues. I hadn't deleted the recordings from the 300GB drive so I didn't have any trouble swapping the 500GB drive out and replacing it with the old 300GB drive. Before doing that (swapping the drives back) I restarted Windows in Safe Mode so I could disable the SageTV service from starting up on reboot, shut down the server, swapped the hard drives, restarted the server, ensured the 300GB drive had the proper drive letter and UNC shares set, replaced the existing wiz.bin with the old wiz.bak I copied from earlier which had a timestamp of just before I swapped the hard drives before the trouble began, and then re-enabled and started the SageTV service. <sigh of relief> It now started up properly and the hard drive swap was again transparent to SageTV so the only recordings I missed were the ones that were scheduled while I was taking care of this mess. I RMA'd the failed drive with Seagate, got my advanced replacement, reswapped the drives, sent Seagate my failed drive, and now after several hours of testing, troubleshooting, swapping, and restoring over the past week, and a couple of headaches later, I'm all set.

Back off topic...I shut down my NAS running FreeNAS and moved the three 1TB drives to my SageTV server for a RAID 5 array so I could have local redundant storage on the server and one less computer running 24/7. I am now considering buying one or two 1TB drives and Windows Home Server and restarting the NAS again to at least backup the boot drives of all computers on my network. For all of the hard drives I have had, I consider myself lucky as this is only the third hard drive I have had fail on me in the last 10 years and I think only 5 or 6 total failed drives dating back to the early 90's. I think I've pushed my luck about as far as it will go without having some kind of backup strategy.

[stevech]

wow.
My idea is that external USB drives and thumb drives are the way to go for irreplaceable files and photo collections. Video files are just on RAID1 and I hope Windows XP never corrupts the file system. It hasn't, since many years ago.

On 1TB drives, today's paper had Hitachi drives at Staples or Office Depot or some such, for $80 after a $30 mail in rebate (if you dare)

EDIT:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-167-_-Product