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Wordless Wednesday
I think Ctrl’s losing control!
I haven’t been writing in this blog as much as I should. Surprisingly I’m spending all my time, it seems, trying to pick out new themes for few of my sites. Did you know that the more you download and test out the harder it gets to pick just one? Yeah … it’s true.
Well .. at least with all this theme testing I’ll have some great themes to tell you guys about just as soon as I get around to telling you about them.
I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.
All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.
Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:
1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.
2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.
3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.
4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.
There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.
I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.
Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.
For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:
That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.
DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.
Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.
DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.
You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.
On Sunday as I was looking some of my blogs that share the same domain I noticed that the “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.” message had disappeared. I didn’t think much of it, but a while later when I happened to scroll to the bottom of the page I noticed that it said my WP version was 2.5.
That was strange. You see, the blog I was working with had just been updated to version 2.3.3 using files stored on my computer. The same files that I’d used to update a few blogs on my other domains over the last couple of weeks.
I went and looked at each of the other blogs that I’d updated from 2.1 or 2.2 to version 2.3 and those that were on their own domain still said they were using WP version 2.3.3, but all of the blogs that are located on my Feverishthoughts.com domain – even the ones that are still using much older versions of WP say that they are using WordPress version 2.5 now.
I checked the files for each of the now 2.5 blogs using FTP and by looking at them using my hosting c-panel and there were no extra files that shouldn’t be there. I even checked my web hosts Fantastico version of WP and they are still only using the 2.3.3 upgrade so there’s no way that they did some kind of automatic WP upgrade on my behalf.
The fact of the matter is that the blogs that now say they are using WP version 2.5 are still really using whatever version of WP that they had been prior to my discovery. Nothings changed in the admin panel – you know the new look that 2.5 is supposed to have? Everything about the way the admin area of my blogs are set up are still the same.
So why do some of my blogs say they are using WP version 2.5? Is it some kind of WP glitch? If it is, why don’t my blogs that are on their own domain now also falsely say they are using 2.5?
Has anyone else noticed this strange problem?
BTW I do plan on upgrading all my sites to WP 2.5 shortly, but I’d like to wait a few weeks to be sure that most of the glitches are out of the latest version. I also want to make sure that the plugins that I’m using have upgrades that work with 2.5 as well.
So for now I’ll stick with 2.3 which the majority of my sites are now using and those that aren’t will be upgraded within a few days. Just upgrading to 2.3 has been a pain because I had to widgetize some sites and change from really old themes with function calls that didn’t work with 2.3 to newer themes. For some blogs upgrading has been a total overhaul!
Considering that I just completed a post discussing how important it is to prepare your site properly and backup files prior to upgrading your blogs installation of WordPress I thought it might be interesting to tell you about an article that discusses the history of backup.
Data can easily be corrupted when new software is installed, when a virus is introduced to the system or when there is a power failure or power surge. A mangled line of code due to any of the above causes or any of the multitude of other sources of corrupt data can cause companies to lose sales and man power hours during the time it takes to find the source of the problem. Likewise, corrupt data on a home computer can cause a lot of woe too.
That’s why regularly backing up data is so important. A backup is essentially a copy of working files or intact data. Did you know that some of the first backups were done on either big reels of magnetic tape, paper or paper tape? Those first backups occurred in the 1950’s.
We’ve come a long way since then!
While it’s true that some backups are still done on tape backup most data backups now occur on hard drives, flash hard drives, CDs and DVDs and even via network.
The article that I referred to earlier, The History of Backup, discusses how backup has evolved and how the equipment and gadgets that we use to perform data backup have changed over the years.
It’s actually quite an interesting article. You can see how demand for better data backup spurred the invention of a wide variety of data backup devices and how as the demand rose the price of this technology eventually fell into reasonably inexpensive products that even the average home computer user can afford.
Earlier today as I was surfing the net and reading some of the blogs I favor I came across an article about a new plugin that will help you prepare your WordPress installation for an upgrade to version 2.3.3 and coming soon WP 2.5.
The WordPress plugin is called the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Plugin. The current version, 1.1, is meant for those who are about to upgrade their WP installation to 2.3.
The Preflight Check plugin will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for any problems that might cause errors when upgrading. It apparently also works in 2.3 and may help identify the cause of any current errors as well.
As I stated in March I was slowly going through my sites and upgrading them from WordPress versions 2.1 and 2.2 to 2.3. I have a lot of blogs and to be perfectly honest with you I still have four left to upgrade!
I’m using some highly customized older themes on a few of my blogs and as I’ve upgraded I’ve found code that I had to alter to work with WP 2.3. I also had to update a number of plugins. This was time consuming work. I’m sure the Preflight Check plugin will make finishing my upgrades to my final four WP blogs a lot easier. Of course I’ve already updated the plugins.
The plugin author is currently working on a version for WP 2.5 so if you’re planning on upgrading to 2.5 soon be sure to check the Preflight Check page for updates.
Oh and don’t forget to backup your WordPress database and files before you do any upgrades! I use the WordPress Database Plugin which allows you to not only backup your files to the server, but to have your backup emailed to you as well. You can also schedule regular backups too.
