Getting organised...

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:40 pm

Simmosonic wrote:

Prior to my last expedition (November 2007 to January 2008) I could fit everything onto a 750GB drive, which was the largest I could comfortably afford.

Oh, by the way, some of you might find this interesting...

The 750GB drive mentioned above was formatted for FAT32, primarily so that it could be read by Mac and Windows machines. Although I'm a Windows user and believe that NTFS is superior, I needed cross-platform compatibility. I'm *so* glad I chose FAT32!

While in Kathmandu, I had the 750GB drive hooked up to my long suffering ThinkPad when the power went out. Being mains powered, the drive stopped, of course. This happens regularly in Kathmandu (in fact, they have two x four hour blackouts scheduled each day during Winter to conserve electricity).

Anyway, when the power came back on I found that the 750GB could not be read by my ThinkPad any more. The file allocation table (or similar) had been corrupted, and nothing I can find in Windows is able to fix it. The ThinkPad sees the drive on the USB port, but can't open it or repair it.

Fortunately, the drive functions perfectly on a Macintosh.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm assuming the Mac and the PC create their own file allocation tables or directories or whatever. Obviously, the PC version got corrupted because it was being accessed when the power cut. The Mac directory remained unscathed. I haven't lost anything except the ability to access the data from a Windows machine.

Now that I'm back to civilisation, I've got to remedy the situation...

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 12:45 am

Simmosonic wrote:

But seriously... No, I'm using XP Pro with SP2 on a three-year-old IBM T43 ThinkPad that's had a hard life and is currently getting crankier by the day - despite my continual fondling and fawning.

It's been my personal experience that things in general get crankier WITH fondling and fawning, not in spite of. (At least that's the story according to my wife.) Confused

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 2:30 am

Cucco wrote:

At least that's the story according to my wife.

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 4:42 am

[EDIT]

Not sure how this reply made it into this thread! I thought I had posted it to another thread. Please ignore.

Maybe from the server transition???
[/EDIT]

One word.... FilemakerPro

There's a premade database that probably already fits 99% of what you want.

Lemme know what platform you're on and I can edit it up a bit to be a standalone runtime for you to try out... or run.

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 6:45 am

Greg

In relation to the power outage and your 750 Gb drive being unreadable by the thinkpad, here is a thought.

When a drive is formatted and the FAT (File allocation tables) are created, the system actually creates two FAT's that mirror each other. The idea is that in the old days, when anyone worth their IT salt could use a disk editing program and repair the corrupt FAT with the good copy.

Having said that, I wonder if the MAC is just smarter. It may recognise the first FAT as corrupt and automatically look at the copy FAT.

On the same point it's worth noting that as drives get bigger, the chances of you loosing a LOT of data when it fails increases. I know you probably do, but ALWAYS keep backups. With the cost of drive falling all the time, it is often worth have a duplicate drive with the same data on it (Just in case)

BTW Love your work.

Regards
John

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 2:55 pm

Wow... thanks for the wake-up call, JackHenry!

I had prematurely forgotten about this particular thread. I had posted the same initial question (in search of a database) to two other places as well (nature recordists list and phonography list), and seemed to have been getting answers left, right and centre.

I still haven't settled on a database app yet (I've had to put the idea on hold for a week or two) but I have solved my 750GB drive problem. - by copying everything off it onto a combination of a Mac's internal drive and a number of smaller FAT32 drives, then reformatting the 750GB and transferring it all back again. Because I was using a Mac to do all of this, I had to format the drive as FAT32 - the Mac can't write to NTFS drives.

It took many hours, by the way. And I also remembered something I'd learnt a long time ago from when I used to be a Mac support guy - the Mac does not like doing large file transfers over USB2. I was transferring about 40GB or so from the Mac's internal drive to the 750GB and it was taking forever. I took a close look and realised it had simply frozen about 1/3 of the way through the transfer; no drive activity, nothing. I waited about 45 minutes and it was still frozen, and nothing short of unplugging the power brought it back to life (ironically, it was a power cut that started this problem in the first place, but this time I didn't cut the power to the 750GB drive). So I visited the local PC shop and bought a hard drive 'combo' case with USB2 and Firewire interfaces, and started again. Slower than USB2 (400 vs. 480, IIRC) but rock solid.

Now everything is back in order again. The search for the filing method/database will resume soon...

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 3:31 pm

JackHenry wrote:

When a drive is formatted and the FAT (File allocation tables) are created, the system actually creates two FAT's that mirror each other. The idea is that in the old days, when anyone worth their IT salt could use a disk editing program and repair the corrupt FAT with the good copy.

Yes, that's what saved my data in this case. However, there was nothing in Windows that could recover it. Also, I downloaded a couple of apps that claimed to be able to rebuild the MBR (Master Boot Record) and they didn't do a good job. One rattled away for a moment and pronounced the problem solved, but the drive was still not fixed. The other sat there for a huge amount of time, until I got nervous and quit.

JackHenry wrote:

Having said that, I wonder if the MAC is just smarter. It may recognise the first FAT as corrupt and automatically look at the copy FAT.

Somewhere, in the numerous places I've discussed this, someone said the Mac actually makes its own copy of the MBR and stores it elsewhere on the disk. If that's the case, then it is fortunate that the drive had recently been accessed by a Mac prior to the 'crash', allowing that to happen.

But that would imply that only the files listed on the Mac's MBR would be recovered... Not that it's a problem, this drive does not get daily use, and I don't recall losing anything.

JackHenry wrote:

On the same point it's worth noting that as drives get bigger, the chances of you loosing a LOT of data when it fails increases.

Absolutely; something to do with eggs and baskets, isn't it? Wink

I have at least one set of backups on hard drive for all of my recordings, and I'm thankful for that.

I've also been dabbling with a radically new and highly experimental passive organic backup technology, 100% immune to magnetic fields, power cuts, head crashes and so on. It's quite amazing, and because the NDA expired midnight yesterday I guess I can talk about it here. You FTP your files to the system's inventor, and he then sends them to a dimly-lit sweatshop in China where hundreds of 10 year old kids kneel on the dirt floor over flickering old green CRT screens, converting your files into enormous strings of 1s and 0s, beautifully caligraphed onto the finest rice paper. Redundancy consists of two kids hunched over the same screen, and error correction is a good solid whack across the shoulders with a bamboo cane. It takes one kid about three weeks to do a GB, and it only costs me 10c.

Fantastic! What will they think of next?

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 9:34 pm

May be a bit ghetto, but I've used iTunes with great success for this. The initial setup is a lot of work bringing in titles, artists, etc... but all the music library is in it is a big database.

--Ben

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 7:11 am

I too used iTunes for something similar.

I have recordings of the birds in my area (feathered) and have a photo of each (again feathered) as the 'Album Artwork'

It works real well. As I have it playing the bird calls, the 'Album' cover scrolls through with each different call playing. Nice and handy for teaching kids about different birds

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:19 pm

JackHenry wrote:

As I have it playing the bird calls, the 'Album' cover scrolls through with each different call playing. Nice and handy for teaching kids about different birds

Thanks Ben and Jack, those are both great ideas worth considering. Simple, too!

Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 6:51 pm

Greg

In relation to the Original Topic of this post, you may find this useful from James Huckle. He's written an app to do what you're after.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/naturerecordists/messages/32342?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1

Regards
John

Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:10 pm

JackHenry wrote:

In relation to the Original Topic of this post, you may find this useful from James Huckle. He's written an app to do what you're after.

Thanks very much, John.

It's an interesting path... I started the same thread here, on nature recordists and on the phonography list. Then I watched it get quite detailed (especially with the nature recordists), lots of people getting involved and making many useful contributions. At the same time, my own workload picked up enormously, so all I could do was kind of sit on the sidelines and see what came of it.

I've just downloaded the app, thanks to your post. I haven't paid enough attention to the digests of those groups yet, I've been flat out. So, you've saved me a lot of reading!

I'll give it a try and let people know how it turns out...

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 12:46 am

@ the Original topic - try using Google Desktop. It's free, stable as hell, a resource hog, but has all the features you're looking for, I think...

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