April 9, 2008
Good morning everyone! Well, it has been a couple days from hell… that’s the only way to say it. Late Sunday night, I walked into my office and heard a dreaded clicking noise coming from my development PC… 10 minutes later, one of my biggest fears had became a reality - I lost a hard drive! Fortunately, I had a full drive backup from early February, but there was still plenty on the drive since then, that is poof, gone forever!
Moving on… The reason for this post today is to shed a little bit of light on the new BANS Onsite Search MOD I will be making public in the next day or two. In my own opinion, it is by far, one of the best MOD’s you could add to store! The reason I worked so hard to get this done was due to what I kept seeing in my site logs… On one site, the second most popular page on the site was the “/search page” and I know through my Google Analytics, I could see what people were searching for, but there was no easy way to take those searches and incorporate them into the site… thus, the BANS Onsite Search MOD.
Watch the short video below and learn exactly how it works - I will be making this mod available by the end of the week.
Update: BANS Search Mod is Available!
Comments and suggestions always welcome.
Mark
Popularity: 15% [?]
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Just added to Jeff’s List of Things to Do ASAP!
BACKUP MY HARD DRIVE AND MY STORES!!!
thanks for the reminder, although i sure hate you had to deal with that!!
Glad you had a backup that was functional.
In July 2004, date burned in my mind, I heard that same clicking sound and from that moment on there was no recovering the data.
To make it worse my backups were no good as the problem turned out to be my power supply and it wasn’t feed power properly.
The only thing that saved me the internet. I had all my websites still available to download so I didn’t lose my content but everything that was in the works for future content was history.
I would say that it was the most horrific day of my online life.
I know in the video Mark mentions buying more hard drives and setting up some method to do all sorts of fancy back-up on multiple hard drives …
But for those of simple-thinking and cash-strapped folks, what is the BEST way to do a back-up, how often should it be done, and what exactly should be backed up? I, too, have had a hard drive go out on me although most of the data was recovered. It is an incredibly scary thing to have happen. This past year I have been paying to have my back-up stored by some company but it is getting expensive as I back up more stuff and I just have to keep my fingers crossed that things are being done as they should be.
Cindy
@ Cindy -
There is a quite a bit of software that can create an image of your hard drive and store on DVD or CD’s, whichever type of writeable drive you may have. I will let others share the software they use… The last one I used was called drive image pro.
Most hard drive manufacturers also offer some drive management software that has an image tool built into it.
Essentially, you just take an image of your drive, store it on disk, and it is there should you need to reimage a drive in the future. Kind of like restore software you get when you buy a new PC…
When failure occurs… replace your drive etc, pop in your image retore disk, it is reverted back to the way it was on your last backup image.
Mark
@ Cindy -
I have been using Norton Ghost to create a backup image of my entire hard drive like Mark talked about above. I save the backup image to an external hard drive. One time cost for the Ghost software (70$) and hard drive - price varies according to how much storage. $30 for 80GB to $200 for 1,000GB - you can get it on eBay!
@Mark -
Thanks for the reminder. Backing up now! Sorry though for your setback. Hoping what you lost will come back to you bigger and better. :)
Mark - awesome mod you’ve been working on. Looks like you are dropping some code into a content page. I would assume you could do the same into a side column - I’m thinking less clicks for the user. Wonder if any advantage for SEO too???? Keep us posted on the progress.
I know the pain of hard drives too. Check out mozy.com - Unlimited Online backup. If you had drives networked you could back them all up. The price is right too.
Had this happen more than once but not with so much work lost. I bought 500GB exteral hard drive for all my CPUs and a power box with 60 Mins backup power so nothing gets lost during a power outage. Worth every penny. I think you can get a westell 500gb for around a $100.
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I’ve heard of many people talking about “backing up” their stores in case of a total loss….however, I wouldn’t even know where to start w/that!
The way I’m going to back up my stores…
Use CuteFTP or whatever you use..
Make a folder on my computer called BANSBackup or whatever you want to call it..
use CuteFTP to copy all the files and folder from the server to that folder on my computer - making different folders within the BANSBackup for each store..
Then copy that folder from my hard drive to my external hard drive I use for backups.. AND Burn to a CD or DVD for an extra copy!
I’m sure some others have different ways and maybe better or easier ways, but this is how i would do it..
I’m sorry…I feel like I came to the baseball game with a hockey stick.
What’s an external hard drive, where do you get it and what do you do with it?
Thanks,
Honey
P.S. As long as I’m airing my ignorance…can anyone help me with a flash header that’s showing up in IE but not FF?
And external hard drive is a storage device that most use for “extra” storage, such as pictures, songs, video etc etc.. OR to use for backup, OR both. Most external hard drives plug into a USB port on your computer and you can copy or move files from your desktop or laptop hard drive to the external drive for safe keeping.. if your desktop or laptop drive fails, you would have your important documents, word files, excel files, pictures etc etc on the external or “backup drive”. Then if you replaced your hard drive on your laptop or desktop, you could copy the data back to your computer from the external hard drive where you had backed it up.
As Mark said, alot of people make “images” of the entire system, which puts it back as it was, operating system, programs and everything. But you would still want to save that image somewhere besides your computer.
I buy most of my computer related items at newegg.com
Mark ,
Sorry about hard drive problems, I have had this sort of thing happen in the past but I was not into Bans then… When you showed on the video about the MOD you are working on …Will it only be for 3.0 or will it work on 2.0??? …………..I tried 3.0 on my new site and did not like it ,,,thats just me I guess. I used 3.0 for 2-3 hours then took it back down to 2.0epn…
@ Otis -
The search MOD is for 2.0 and 3.0…
What happened to your 3.0 store, what did it not like?
Mark
Looks like a very useful mod. A way to capture those visitor search terms would be great. You can be sure you’ve got at least a tip coming for that one!
And as far as backups, I’ve been backing up all of my data using Amazon S3 via JungleDisk for several months now. The great thing is that after the initial setup, I don’t need to do a thing — no swapping in new media or remembering to run a backup app regularly. Or worrying about, for instance, how to recover from an office fire that takes out my backup hard drive along with the computer it was supposed to backup. Every night at 3am, it automagically uploads any new/updated files it finds in the areas I designate.
Right now, I’m storing somewhere in the 15 -20gig range, most of which is family video & pics — code is tiny in comparison to a 30 minute video. My monthly bill is around $4, of which a buck of that is for an addon service that lets me access my data from any internet connection. Well worth the cost of a good cup of coffee… ;)
Put your hard drive in the freezer overnight then retry it.
Best of luck in data recovery.
Jeff
Hey Sean,
Thanks for the tip about Jungle Disk. I’ll have to check them out more thoroughly but the price can’t be beat. I’ve been paying $2/GB! I like not having to remember to do my own back-up and having it off-site, but I don’t like the price I’ve been paying.
Cindy
@ Jeff -
Yup… put it into an external case, froze it for about 8 hours… still nothing. Even tried the ol’ hammer to the corner of the case routine.
After I stopped crying and realized it was gone.. I opened it up to look at the disks. The top disk has a huge gouge in it… pfft.
Mark
mark,
as always the mod looks great. keep my name handy when you make it available as I will be a BUYER.
very powerful information. kind of like wordtracker just on a smaller scale.
jeff
Another great video, Mark, and very exciting about the new MOD. I think you should definitely charge - you give away so much great information and put so much of your own time into this stuff. Just my two cents.
Sweet Mod! What an easy and effective way to broaden out a store. Can’t wait to BUY it -
Jamie
Mark,
How did you change the wording on the search results when no items where found?
Thanks,
Jamie
@ Jamie -
In the admin section of the search MOD, you can actually click onto the term and see if there are any active listings.
If none - I add a page of listings! :-)
If yes - I then make the term available on the public page.
I have seen it go both ways as well - a term that delivers 100 results today, comes back with no products tomorrow!! Makes no sense sometimes…
Mark
You probably have a solution on your future hard drive recovery by now, but I can tell after losing everything - not once - but twice - I finally subcribed to Mozy. It was the best thing I ever did. I actually did have another crash after I had subscribed to it — and after reloading my program discs it took about an hour to restore everything back on my drive just the way it was. There may be others — but it has been a lifesaver for me —
Thanks for all your mods - they are great. Sherri
[…] Build a Niche Store Add-On for Onsite Search Metrics […]
Hi all,
Some Hard drive information, We run several apps for trading the financial markets that wear out hard drives due to constant writing of information to the drives. We learned that the wear of the drives was do to heavy fragmentation and Windows Defrag was useless and had to be run manually. Along comes DisKeeper and no more drive crashes. It is truly an amazing app that runs in the background automatically defraging as many drives as you desire. They have a free trail at http://www.diskeeper.com or Google it.
Regards,
David G.
Mark,
If the data is very important, send it in for recovery. Using IT Forensics, they can restore data from even fire damaged discs. Think you have over written the data on the disc? Think again. After several wipes with erasing technology, data is still recovered. Scary really.