I’ve built a monster and now I’m worried…our local town and many of our marinas have decided to use my wx website as there main point to link. Even NOAA asked for my audio feed. Although today, everything is working just fine, the wx computer has been up and running now for 14 months, 24/7. The new boating season is just about upon us and I’ve been thinking what would I do if my computer went down and how would I recover.
I have a notebook computer and an old desktop that I could use in an emergency but I’m thinking an emergency is not the time to be loading and setting up software, then finding and setting all of the files and switches to where they need to be.
Have any of you been thru this problem…does anyone have a good recommendation on how to make a back up system that could be back on the air rather quickly? I’d think this would be important issue for many of us!
Weather Display, Weather Display Live and a Davis WX Station are the backbone of all I do…I started to load WD on another machine but my original registration code wouldn’t let me get past the trial period…Windy am I correct in assuming WD is licensed for one machine? Same I guess is true for WD Live.
Anxious to hear any advice all may have…thanks for any help!
WDL is not licensed to a machine but to a domain and should be unaffected if you move WD to another machine as you would just continue to upload your clientraw files from the new machine to your website.
You could also consider an external drive. I have an external USB drive to which I back up the whole WD directory every day. In case of a crash I won’t be more than a day behind.
The backup software I use, and most others I would assume, allows you to backup a file every time it changes. That may be a little excessive with WD as often as it changes files. I believe you can also have it backup at any interval you want. Just another option.
Bob/Dave - thanks for the advice…especially the thread with the step by step info…Dave, when you automate the everyday backup, are you shutting down WD before you do it? The thread seems to have a few steps before doing just a backup of C:\WD - My WX computer is on my network and I could automate a backup to a large drive I have on another machine. Which B/U software are you using?
Thanks
I use Ghost 10 for just this purpose. In the event of a melt down, I can be back up with a new computer with relative ease.
I have ghost 10 backing up every two hours 24/7 to a network drive.
Once the initial backup is made, it only takes mere seconds for Ghost to do an incremental backup automatically every two hours.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give, is be sure you have everything surge protected “properly”.
Including a good UPS such as an APC Backups RS 1500. http://www.provantage.com/apc-br1500~7AMPU05X.htm
Also be sure your serial port is surge protected. http://www.provantage.com/apc-ps9-dce~7AMPO242.htm
Make sure your cable/dsl modem & router is properly surge protected and on a good UPS.
The last 3 items will save you much grief.
Using Ghost 10, is yours a plan that does an image of the whole hard drive and then to recover you re-image a new drive…I’d prefer to just backup and transfer whatever is needed to make WD and WDL whole again.
I agree with all of your surge and UPS suggestions…I think I’m in real good shape with all of that and even have a 16KW generator to back up house power should we loose it!
And if that’s all your concerned about, then WD has automated backup builtin.
I run that as well.
You don’t need to “backup” anything for WDL.
It all resides on your internet server. Nothing on your local computer.
If you do a complete backup of WD, then you have all you need to get WDL running again.
Don’t forget to surge protect your cat 5 network that’s coming into the weather computer.
After reading another thread on here (I think) about this, I got to thinking that I didn’t have any way to backup my data. So I got myself a 250GB external hard drive this week.
It took about 3 hours to do the initial backup, I did all 41.7GB on the C: drive including all the programs, files and emails etc so I’m not surprised really.
Now it only backs-up new or changed files so it takes no time.
One tip though, if you for this type of thing and you want to partition the drive, do it before you make the first back-up! #-o
No I don’t shut WD down and neither program ever complains. I do the backup following the time WD does it’s daily backup.
I’m using Good Sync. It’s free to use but starts to nag because of the amount or frequency or some restriction. I did buy it and it works fine every day.
Sync Back has a non nagging freeware version that works well IME.
I’m just expressing my personal opinion, but this situation of having folks dependent on data from a hobby station just scares the heck out of me. There’s no way I would want any part of that 8O
I think what the majority of us do is great and it may give folks some alternative views and maybe a bit more granular look at the actual weather in their specific local, but to depend on it for anything other than that would be IMHO scary…
I don’t think you can if you choose to publish your data on the internet.
Just make sure that every page contains a disclaimer along the line of: “Never base important decisions on this or any weather information obtained from the Internet.” or “DO NOT USE FOR PROTECTION OF LIFE AND PROPERTY!”
In my case, I needed some way of backing up the data stored on my PC. I didn’t buy the external drive just because I’m running WD and didn’t want to loose the records.
…and also if you see other sites incorporating your data with some degree of “officialness” contact them and discuss it. (I have no idea what relationship, if any, the original poster has with those sites, my comments are intended generically, not aimed at any individual.)
