HIT(?): When the server crashes

["Karen G. Schneider" <kgs@BLUEHIGHWAYS.COM>]

1.  First, I recommend eating something sweet with a lot of chocolate--it
will calm your nerves.  ;)

2.  Second, have you contacted your OCLC network to ask about tape
downloads?  If, like us, you copy catalog into OCLC and then link records
locally to barcodes, you may have a lot of post-processing to do but at
least you will have the records.

3.  You might price the cost of processing 500 records versus
professionally getting data from a hard drive.  If the hard drive CAN be
recovered, that should be the priority, not manually rebuilding every
record.

>  This week I started my third year as Media Specialist at a small
>private school in Atlanta.   After three years I though I was in for
>no surprises.  I spent two weeks coming in part time and leisurely
>getting ready for the new year.  I cleaned up tossed out a lot of old
>clutter and though the new year would be no problem.  Then it happened
>the hard drive on our server went belly up.  My 5,000 some marc
>records were no longer on line.  The technologist fixed it and checked
>the back up.  Several back ups were bad (we were doing then
>quarterly), the most recent one was from November of '95.  Nearly 500
>records I had created from last year were lost.
>
>        With out whinning about the work ahead for me I'd like to say:
>1. Do you know if your back ups are really good, I have since been
>told that older tape drives are not reliable(my case proves this.)
>2.  If there is a question of reliability double your backup rotation.
>3. Backup more often than we did.
>4.  The price of recovering data off a dead hard drive is beyond the
>reach of most budgets.
>5.Any suggestions for me to regain the records without weeks of work?
>
>Tom Zarrilli
>
>
>>

------------------------------------------------------------------
Karen G. Schneider * kgs@bluehighways.com * schneider.karen@epamail.epa.gov
Author, The Internet Access Cookbook (e-mail Neal-Schuman@icm.com)
Director, US EPA Region 2 Library * Cybrarian * Columnist, American Libraries
Visit our library at our new URL: http://www.epa.gov/Region2/library/
These opinions strictly mine!