Adobe Madness

[SmartWombat]

Well I finally got PS CS2 for the desktop and PSE4 for the laptop.
Shame I can't install either on my desktop machine

Looks like Adobe is pointing up a system level failure in my WinXP Home SP2.
Trying to find out why PSE4 failed to install, I can't run the application log event manager.
I just get

Unable to complete the operation on "Application".
The interface is unknown.

Which means Windows is messed up royally.


And for PS CS2 the Adobe activation server is down, for the last 3 hours.
So I can't use that at all - I downloaded the 30 day trial in February, uninstalled it, and despite having a serial number my licensed PS CS2 claims it won't run because the free trial is over.


I don't know how Adobe manage to make Microsoft licensing adn activation look good

[Peter_AUS]

Paul,

When you uninstalled the full version, I take it you bought the full version, if you uninstall it again, it should give you two options to uninstall it, one being uninstall the registration details as well.

You might find that you haven't got enough diskspace for windows to run correctly, windows needs a minimum of 30 meg free space to always work correctly, but I would assume that you have more than enough space being into photography probably megagigs of space.

The other thing it could be a memory problem as well.

[SmartWombat]

I uninstalled my old PSE 2 that came with the Canon and the unregistered tryout of PS CS2 first.

No disk space problems, two 350G SATA drives in the main machine.
31G free on the system drive, 96G on the data drive.
(900G on the 4 external drives makes 1.4TB in total storage)
No memory problems, with 512M - might be worth adding another 512 for PS though.

PSE 4 wouldn't run, came up saying there was a system error.
PS CS2 would run, but wouldn't register, and so shut down.

There were no event log entries since May - and I wasn't checking regularly
Several system services were switched off.

Yes, I run an antivirus program and have it set to gather updates every hour, and run a realtime scanner. I run two anti-spyware programs each week, there wasn't any.

Interestingly, I installed the AV program in May and it's come up clean several times since then on a full system scan. Coincidence that event logging stopped in May also? I think not !
I eventually tracked down (thanks to mvps.org) the problem to a nasty little worm that hit my system.
- - - - C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell.exe [WORM_KELVIR.AZ]
That nasty little worm bypassed or reconfigured the system to cloak itself - probably just before the AV program was installed.

[Peter_AUS]

So has that been the problem them with installing.

I did know you had a TB of disk space. I think it would be very beneficial to maybe consider a tape drive for backup they are universal as well across many platforms too.

[SmartWombat]

Yes definitely, but which tape technology?
I'll ask some geeks at work in the IT systems team.

[mgmoore7]

Yes definitely, but which tape technology?
I'll ask some geeks at work in the IT systems team.

Do you want to backup just your system or all of those external drives as well.

[SmartWombat]

Probably one drive at a time.
Plus a system backup on the internal drives.

But if I go to 300M or larger as drive prices come down, then maybe one tape per external drive may be too expensive.

[masdog]

One of my friends is an IT coordinator/administrator at a nearby school district, and one of his first actions was to replace the school's outdated tape backup system since he couldn't get repair parts for it. Most tape backups that he looked at were a little beyond his budget, so he started backing up to a spare computer with a lot of large hard drives.

[mgmoore7]

I would say that a tape solution to backup that amount of data efficiently probably would not be the best solution since it will be very expensive (several thousand just for the drive) then the tapes on top of that.

For your system: I would recommend Symantec Ghost. It will do full and incremental backups (changes only) on a schedule automatically. It takes a "image" backup of your hard drive and is the simplest way to restore a complete system in case of hard drive, failure, virus, etc. The destination of the backup would be another hard drive, either internal or external. It will compress the backup about 50-60%.

For your other drives, I would buy a "mirror" drive for each one. You could use the Ghost product to manage the backups as well. The next best alternative from a cost and longevity perspective would be DVDs but that will take a long time. Ghost will write to CDs and DVD too.

Hope this helps.

[SmartWombat]

My normal flow is:
shoot to CF card, RAW
when full
use new CF card from left pocket *
copy full CF card to portable XSII drive
put used CF card in right pocket when copied
* if no card in left pocket, use copied card from right pocket, format in camera
lather, rinse, repeat

back home:
copy XSII backup files to HD at home
burn RAW files to DVD
convert RAW to JPEG and resize to forum limit
burn JPEG fiels to DVD
Move files off to external HD

[Peter_AUS]

Interesting comments about Tape Backup systems. Interesting also that most businesses use Tape Backup systems all the time. Backups are usually scheduled at night automatically, yes they do take time and hence why it is done at night. It can be setup to just update the files that have changed or been added as well, generally businesses cycle the tapes over a minimum 5 day period (hence business days) or in some cases even longer. Makes me laugh watching Cop drama where they go and get Video Tapes from Stores that could be 2 weeks to several months ago and actually find them. I don't think in the real world this actually happens, in my experience anyway.

I still think Tapes are an option to investigate.

http://www.exabyte.com/support/onlin...asicbackup.pdf

A comparison of 9 tape backup systems as well. Might give you some ideas.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hard...0274227,00.htm

I'm not saying this is the only option, just an alternative option to look at, considering the amount of drives suggested and the view for storage etc, in the long term a tape backup system is a viable option to consider.

Keep in mind this is informational only, I am not suggesting any of the products as they are very expensive, but the info might help in deciding which way to jump.

[masdog]

Symantec Ghost is alright, but there are some free, Linux live cd based imaging utilities available that do basically the same job.