Hardware failure is a scary thing. It is not possible to predict when it will occur or the affect it will have. One thing that is certain is data loss resulting from hardware failure. We cannot prevent failure but we can guard against its effects. The most efficient way of preventing loss is to regularly backup our data.

Span.com specialises in providing you with the equipment necessary to prevent data loss. Whether you are a domestic user backing up family photos or a video editor with hundreds of gigabytes of raw video, we can supply you with an appropriate solution to store your data quickly and safely.

"Prevention rather than cure". A phrase often used in the medical world. It can also be applied to data backup. It is always cheaper to backup than it is to retrieve lost data from failed hardware.

If you are still not convinced about the benefits of backing up, have a look at the information below.

The effect of data loss on companies.
It is possible to see in the diagram (above) that data loss has a huge financial impact on businesses.
These figures include considerations such as man-hours and revenue lost through data loss.
These statistics are courtesy of Ontrack Ltd. A specialist data recovery company.

When you consider that most businesses experience on average, two hours of downtime per week, those are incredible figures. Below are a few facts associated with data loss.

1. Most companies value 100 megabytes of data at more than $1 million.

2. 43 percent of lost or stolen data is valued at $5 million.

3. 43 percent of companies experiencing disasters never reopen, and 29 percent close within two years. (McGladrey and Pullen).

4. It is estimated that 1 out of 500 data centers will have a severe disaster each year. (McGladrey and Pullen)

5. 40 percent of respondents to a computer security survey had detected and verified incidents of computer crime during the previous year. (NCSA Annual Worry Report)

6. Computer crimes cost firms who detect and verify incidents of computer crime between $145 million and $730 million each year. (NCSA Annual Worry Report)

7. A company that experiences a computer outage lasting more than 10 days will never fully recover financially. 50 percent will be out of business within five years. ("Disaster Recovery Planning: Managing Risk & Catastrophe in Information Systems" by Jon Toigo)

If you are unfortunate enough to have lost data and did not have it backed up, dont worry yourself too much! It can probably be retrieved but unfortunately it will not be cheap.

span.com recommends RetroData, who can recover data from practically any storage medium, from memory cards to workstation drives, right through to mammoth RAID arrays and mass storage devices. They offer Standard, Priority and Priority+ services - they guarantee successful data recovery, or not to charge at all.
To contact them please call: 01590 673808
RetroData website : www.retrodata.co.uk.

span.com is a partner with Ontrack Data Recovery Services, a specialist in data recovery from most sorts of hardware and media. They offer a full and world renowned data recovery service and are pleasant and efficient.
To contact them please call: 00800 1012 1314
Ontrack website : www.ontrack.co.uk.
Quote the reference "WOR100" for a free upgrade to priority service.

Maxtor is promoting a five-step "best practices" program for basic protection.

1) Develop a backup schedule--backup data daily or at minimum weekly.

2) Backup everything--today users can easily backup all of their computer hard drive data. No need to spend time sorting through every file or folder. Invest in a storage solution thats twice the size of your internal hard drive to give your system room to grow.

3) Do it automatically--set it and forget it. Use a solution thats easy to set up and provides automatic backups.

4) Rotate backups--give added protection in case of an earthquake, fire, flood, or theft. Use two drives and rotate one offsite.

5) Dont procrastinate--unfortunately, the need to backup data is often a lesson learned from an unfortunate experience. Dont let it happen to you. Have you done it today?

There are three kinds of backup as explained below:

Full Backup:
A Full backup is simply backing up all files on the system.

Incremental Backup:
An incremental backup is a backup that backs up only the files modified since the last backup.

Differential Backup:
A differential backup is a cumulative backup of changes made since the last full backup.

There are many backup strategies out there and you have to pick the one that suits you the best. Here are examples of the most used three types:

Grandfather-Father-Son
The most commonly used media rotation schedule is "Grandfather-Father-Son." This scheme uses daily (Son), weekly (Father), and monthly (Grandfather) backup sets.


The GFS scheme begins with the daily backups. Typically, four backup media are labeled for the day of the week each backs up; for example, Monday through Thursday. Each tape is recalled for use on its labeled day. If only a one-week version history of files is maintained, then each tape is overwritten each week. In order to maintain a 3-week version history of files (recommended), more tapes are required. For example this weeks Monday tape will not be overwritten for 3 weeks.

Weekly backups follow a similar scenario. A set of up to five weekly backup media is labeled "Week1," "Week 2," and so on. Full backups are recorded weekly, on the day that a "Son" media is not used. Following the example above these would be "Friday" tapes. This "Father" media is re-used monthly. Five weekly tapes are required in order to maintain a one-month history of files, as some months have 5 weeks.

The final set of three media is labeled "Month1," "Month2," and so on, according to which month of the quarter they will be used. This "Grandfather" media records full backups on the last business day of each month. If your backup plan follows a corporate fiscal calendar, then your monthly tape will take the place of the week 4 or week 5 weekly/Father tape, depending on the month. If your backup schedule follows calendar months, then your monthly backup will vary throughout the year, replacing a daily or weekly tape. Typically, monthly tapes are overwritten quarterly or yearly (recommended), depending on version history requirements.

Each of these "media" may be a single tape or a set of tapes, depending on the amount of data to back up and the type of backup used (incremental vs. full). Weekly and/or monthly tapes are generally pulled as archive tapes.

Tower of Hanoi
In the Tower of Hanoi backup rotation schedule every disc is a backup media set and every move is a day of a backup. In this case, the earlier a backup media set is used, the more often it is used throughout the backup process. Each additional backup set, added to the backup rotation schedule, is used when the previous ones are not used, and doubles the backup history by keeping an older version of data when it is not used.

The Tower of Hanoi rotation schedule allows having a longer backup history, when compared with the Grandfather-father-son rotation schedule.


In this schedule, one media set "A" is used every other backup session (daily sessions in this example). Start Day 1 with "A" and repeat every other backup (every other day).

The next media set "B" starts on the first non-"A" backup day and repeats every fourth backup session.

Media set "C" starts on the first non-"A" or non-"B" backup day and repeats every eighth session.

Media set "D" starts on the first non-"A," non-"B," or non-"C" backup day and repeats every sixteenth session. Media set "E" alternates with media set "D."

The advantage to the Tower of Hanoi scheme is that with each new media set added to the rotation, the backup history doubles. The frequently used media sets have the most recent copies of a file, while less frequently used media retain older versions.

This backup scheme can be difficult to keep track of manually and therefore is generally done with the help of rotation schemes provided in backup software packages.

As with the Grandfather-Father-Son rotation scheme, tapes should be periodically removed from the rotation for archive purposes.

Incremental Tape Method
This method has a few names and is fairly simple to implement. It involves determining how long you wish to maintain a copy of your data and how many tapes you wish to use. It is based on labeling each tape with a number and then incrementing them through adding and removing one Backup Set each week. It can be configured to allow for either 5-or-7 day backup schemes. An incremental tape rotation method is set up as follows.

The first week you use 1-2-3-4-5-6-7
The second week you use 2-3-4-5-6-7-8
The third week you use 3-4-5-6-7-8-9
The fourth week you use 4-5-6-7-8-9-10
The fifth week you use 5-6-7-8-9-10-11
Tape 1 would then be inserted again 6-7-8-9-10-11-1

You continue this as long as you have tapes and have one tape from every week that you perform a backup able to be stored for a certain period of time. It puts even usage on each tape making sure that a file gets copied to a multiple amount of tapes. The disadvantage is that the backup time can take a while if doing a full backup of multiple servers. It could be varied to do a full backup on the first of every week and then incremental of differential backups every day after that.

An advantage of this system is that tapes can be removed or added to the system at any time if an archive tape or longer file histories are needed. The key is to keep a log of the tape sequence and what date it was last used. This can be calculated months at a time or even for an entire year if necessary.

Once youve established a backup routine, it would be wise to keep these few safe backup tips in mind.

Test your backups!
When you think of it, try restoring a few important files from your backup, just to make sure that your file selections and your backup media are performing as expected.

Check your backup logs.
Most backup software provides a log file after each backup. Log files can be somewhat complicated to read, but you can quickly scan it to look for any problems. If you see words like "Error", "Failed", "Unable to...", etc. you should take a closer look.

Keep a backup off-site!
We all hate to think of it, but things like theft, fire and other natural disasters can destroy your entire work area. Taking your backup media off-site is a good idea. Storing your backups in a safe deposit box is great, but an off-site dresser drawer would suffice.

Look after the storage media.
•Looking after the storage media is nearly as important as doing the backups them selves.
•Store in a cool, dry place, stored in a clean storage case
•Do not leave media sitting around
•Avoid flexing, bending or twisting the media
•Do not touch exposed parts of the media which contain data
•Do not expose to magnetic fields
•Do not continually use the same media - use fresh media in a timely manner

All devices, including the initiator, on a bus must be have a unique number. It is advisable to have the boot device as ID 0.

SETTING SCSI IDs

External SCSI devices usually have a device number switch on the rear of the case, equipped with small "+" and "-" buttons. Using a pin, press the buttons to increase or decrease the device number. To connect the device number switch to the device, attach the wires to the jumpers mentioned below. The black wire MUST be connected to the SCSI ID 0 jumper, the other wires must be connected so that the ID 1 and 2 (and 3 in the case of wide devices) jumpers are covered by the coloured wires. There is no standard to which row of jumpers (top or bottom) the wires go on, and no standard as to which way around the coloured wires go. The only way is to try it until it works.

Internal SCSI devices will require that you manipulate jumpers or DIP switches to set the SCSI ID#. If youre lucky, a small chart will appear on the case of your internally mounted SCSI device, illustrating how to set the jumpers or DIP switch for each SCSI ID#.

If your internal SCSI device doesnt have such a chart, you can still figure out how to set the SCSI ID#. Internally mounted SCSI devices usually have three DIP switches or pairs of jumper pins in a row (four pairs of jumper pins for "Wide" SCSI devices). Figuring out how to set the SCSI ID# for such devices is a matter of simple addition.

Each switch (or pair of pins) has a numeric value associated with it. From left to right, these values are 1, 2, and 4, (and 8 for SCSI-3 devices only). If the switch is on (or the pair of pins has a jumper attached), its value is added to the total. If a switch is off or there is no jumper on a pair of pins, its value is not added (counts as zero). Add these numbers together, and the result is the SCSI ID.

Most SCSI controllers support eight (really seven, as the controller itself is the eighth) devices, each device with a corresponding SCSI ID# number of 0-6 (SCSI ID# 0 is device number one and the controller is SCSI ID# 7, so 1+2+4=7).

Note: Each SCSI device must be assigned its own unique ID. For example, it would not be possible to set two SCSI devices on the chain to ID 2. These devices would conflict and not function. The only way for this to work is if each device is attached to its own SCSI controller card.

Both ends of a SCSI bus (cable) must be be terminated using active terminators.

In practice this can be achieved using either discrete terminators or the internal terminators often provided within the controller and attachable devices.

NO termination is allowed at points along the cable. So any device attached (that is not at the end) must have internal termination disabled.

In the situation where the controller has multiple SCSI ports with differing performance ALL ports must be correctly terminated.

In a situation where the controller has a common port with internal and external connections and both are in use, DO NOT enable termination within the controller, because in this configuration the controller is actually in the middle of the SCSI Bus.

Narrow (50pin) devices SHOULD be connected part way along a wide (68pin) SCSI bus. If you must connect such a device at the end of a wide (68pin) SCSI cable then suitable termination must be added to achieve correct termination of the "unused" data lines. A terminator within the Narrow Device cannot provide this function.

Ensure drive is enabled to “auto start” when power is applied.

Disable Target Initiated Synchronous Negotiation. (AKA Target Initiated Synchronous Data Transfer)

Does the drive spin up and remain spinning ?

Does the SCSI controller recognize the drive during boot up ?

Check all connectors are seated correctly.

Check that there are no bent pins.

Try replacing the cable and terminators if possible, make use of the drives on board termination.

Try low level formatting the drive and verifying the data area.

Check that the cable lengths are within the ANSI specification for the interface transfer rate used and the number of devices installed on the bus.

If attached through a removable carrier, try removing the drive from the carrier and attaching direct to the bus.

If running a “wide” (68 pin) device from a “wide” controller through a “narrow” bus, try “disabling wide negotiation” in the controller.

On multi-channel SCSI controllers, if using one SCSI controller, one must only use two channels of each controller.

LVD devices are backwardly compatible to Single Ended controllers as long as the system and drive(s) are configured correctly. When attaching LVD devices to Single Ended, Wide or Narrow controllers one should consider the following:

LVD hard disk drives have no termination on board. This must be provided for externally, either from another device or from a separate termination block.

Depending on how the controller handles the "Diff Sense" line on the interface you may need to "Force Single Ended" on the drive, this is a jumper able option.

When using drives not made by AVID, remember to disable "Drive Filtering" in the "General Settings" window. This means the system will not allow digitizing to drives that dont meet the standards for the resolution and data rate of the chosen compression rate.

The drawback with using non-Avid drives is that if you use Avid Technical support, they will not support them. So if you choose to go the route of non-Avid drives for editing, I would suggest keeping one small Avid drives and use it during support calls so Avid does not blame the drive array for some other problem as one of the first questions they ask is "Are you using Avid drives?". If you plug the Avid drive in for testing, you can still get the proper support.

Media Suite Pro was discontinued long before the G4 was introduced and therefore Avid will never qualify Media Suite Pro to run on that platform. If you are experiencing drive problems the cause may be one of the following: Since Media Suite Pro was released only on NuBus based CPUs, using a PCI-SCSI card of a brand other than ATTO may cause problems. If this is the case, then the Avid drivers do not recognize the card. This can also happen with ATTO cards of different firmware configurations.

	SCSI ID0	SCSI ID1	SCSI ID2	SCSI ID3
0
1	ON
2		ON
3	ON	ON
4			ON
5	ON		ON
6		ON	ON
7	ON	ON	ON
8				ON
9	ON			ON
10		ON		ON
11	ON	ON		ON
12			ON	ON
13	ON		ON	ON
14		ON	ON	ON
15	ON	ON	ON	ON

If the drive is the only device on the bus:
• Is it at the end of the cable ?
• Is it configured as Master ?

If the drive is one of two devices on the bus:
Is one configured as Master and the other as Slave ?
• Is it at the end of the cable ?

Check all connectors are seated correctly:
• Pin 1 (coloured conductor) is located nearest to the power connector.
• When connecting to the motherboard look for small printed 1 next to the pin to ensure the cable is the correct way round.
• Check that there are no bent pins.
• Try replacing the cable.
• Total cable length should be kept to a minimum and not exceed 18 inches.

• Try running the drive with all other devices removed.

• If attached through a removable carrier, try removing the drive from the carrier and attaching direct to the bus.

• If experiencing problems during Fdisk / partitioning, it may be that your MBR (Master Boot Record) has become corrupt. Try running “ZAP.EXE” or “CLEANDISK.EXE”.

• Microsoft Windows NT, 95A, DOS are limited in that they must be installed within the first 1024 cylinders.

Remember that with IDE the speed of the master governs the speed of the slave. If you buy a new fast hard disk and slave it to your old slow disk, you will have 2 slow disks. For this reason CD and DVD devices should always be slaved wherever possible, and hard disks should be masters.

1.) If you have 1 hard disks it should be installed as the primary master. Any other devices can be added in any order.
2.) If you are adding a second hard disk your primary master should be left as your boot drive, with the second disk as the secondary master. Other devices should be slaved.
3.) If you have 3 hard disks, again make sure the primary master is the boot drive, with a CD or similar device as the primary slave. The 2 hard disks should be added as the secondary master and slave, with the quicker drive set to master.
4.) If you need to add more disks or IDE devices internally, you will need to buy an Ultra100 IDE expansion card which will give you 2 more IDE channels, 2 master and 2 slave.

Remember to enable DMA and read/write caching on all drives. To do this, go into Windows and follow the following steps:
1.) -> Control Panel -> System -> Devices -> Disk Drives -> Generic IDE -> Properties -> Settings
OR
2.) Right click My Computer, Select Properties, Select Device Manager, Double click "Disk Drives", Select the disk drive, Look through the properties until you see the DMA and caching check boxs and tick them, Click OK and restart.

If you are working with video and are having problems with dropped frames, try turning off all auto-save, MS Office Fast-Find and Anti-Virus background applications.

You can adjust the [vcache] setting in the system.ini file to increase the amount, or use a program like "Cacheman" to do it. Only attempt editing a .ini file if you know what you are doing!

Installing too much junk will slow your system down, installing too many demos etc will clog up the registry and degrade system performance. Get in the habit of uninstalling programs you no longer use.

Defragmenting the drives will prevent file fragmentation building up, which can slow the system.

Cant see the full size of your new drive? This could be for a number of reasons.
Older PCs had what is called a BIOS limitation on the size of hard drive they could support. These limits are usually 8gb, 16gb or 32gb.
Windows 98 has a 32gb per drive size limit.
An incorrectly sized partition has been created.
The disk has not been formatted to 100%.

Drives greater than 8.4GB (or 512MB/ 2GB in some older systems):
Upgrade BIOS to latest version.

If your BIOS has a size limit or you are using windows 98 you need to download a program from the hard disk manufacturer. Click on the links below to go to the different companies website pages where you can download these programs. This will also solve the Windows 98 problem!

Recently Mac customers have been experiencing problems connecting FireWire and USB devices. The Mac will stop recognizing the device for no apparent reason. The problem affects new and old devices, with mainly hard disks and CD units being affected, although this is probably because they are the two most common devices.

Both 3rd party cards and Mac internal buses are similarly afflicted. The problem seems to appear on some machines running OS 9.0.4 and 9.1, with a few people having difficulties with 8.6. It is sometimes related to extensions, but not always. There is no fix from apple for this yet. We recommend working through the suggestions listed below and then searching the forums of the websites listed at the bottom.

ALL the returns of FireWire and USB products (bar one) we have received have turned out not to be faulty. You WILL save yourself time and energy by running through the points opposite before calling us.

• Test the device on another Mac. If it OK, how is the Mac different?
• Do other USB/FireWire products work?
• Do you have the latest version of FireWire?
• Do you have the correct USB drivers installed?
• Check Apples website for software upgrades.
• Are extensions conflicting? Toast and iTunes extensions conflicting is a known problem.
• Check your system folder, are the correct extensions installed or are they in the program folder?
• Disable any recently installed extensions.
• If you have up or down-graded your OS, try changing back.
• Try uninstalling any recently installed software.

Problems when using Pro Tools and Digital Performer.

High performance PCI cards have to be able to share the PCI bus with very low latency if they are going to co-exist with Digidesign hardware. Digidesign tech support tells people to slow the SCSI bus down to 10MHz to accomplish this. It has been found that using the options for the card which directly control the PCI bus latency also does the job (surprise, surprise). Adaptec calls this something cryptic like "A/V options", but the documentation explains what it actually does (limits the amount data the controller will pump across the PCI bus without letting other cards onto the bus). ATTO calls it what it is. You actually want to set this to "cache line" (Adaptec) or 32 bytes (ATTO). If you have a 64 bit card and PCI bus, you can probably set it to 64 bytes on the ATTO without having any problems.

Now, for the interesting part. The option to slow the PCI bus down was there because the cabling for Ultra is very twitchy and some people would need to slow the bus down because their cabling wasnt able to do 20MHz. The controller has no way of testing for that.

Ultra2 and Ultra160 have much looser cabling requirements AND the hardware does a standardized speed check handshake when first getting connected; so, it can slow the clock down on its own if the cabling is bad. This means that they dont need any options to manually slow the clock down if all the devices on the bus are at least Ultra2. ATTO explicitly states in their driver manual that the SCSI bus speed options are ignored if the controller and all the drives are at least Ultra2. Since Digi (or at least Digi customer service) doesnt believe in using correct option to reduce latency on the PCI bus, Digi doesnt support Ultra2 or Ultra160 SCSI cards. Digis storage expert has said that they should work...

Whilst we endeavor to provide free technical support for all of our products, sometimes this just is not possible. We at Worldspan are PC rather than Mac orientated and do not have any Macs on site for testing purposes. If you are experiencing difficulties with your new Mac purchase, by all means call us and we will try our best to help you, but sometimes we find this difficult as we have no way of replicating any problems you may have. We would recommend visiting the following website and checking their lists and archives to see if they can be of help.

For further information and help try visiting: www.apple.com or www.macfixit.com