Geek Daily

Ever wanted to run Visual Studio 2003 on Windows Vista? No? Me neither but apparently at least one person has wanted since there is an article on MSDN about how to do it and the problems you should expect to run into.

Just from skimming the list of problems it makes me wonder why on earth anyone would want to do this? Perhaps they enjoy self-inflicted torture? They are using Vista after-all.

Yes I know, they need to support existing .Net 1.1 applications but surely there are better options!?!

a) Upgrade the application.
b) If upgrading is just not feasible then maintain a seperate Windows XP machine and avoid the headaches in the first place.
c) Don’t want to spend a dime? Install a Virtual Machine (VMWare or Virtula PC) with XP on it on the local Vista machine and the problem goes away.

You can get a brand new PC downgraded to XP in the $300 ballpark and I am sure there are still ways to get your hands on XP if you don’t already have a copy. Although, I can’t imagine someone upgrading from Windows 2000 to Vista. I guess there must be some.

I just thought the whole idea of the article was humerous and thought I’d share my thoughts.

I have shared my personal troubles when working with a server that is not on a proper backup routine. I also talked about another blogger who had similar problems not too long ago. Today, however, I read a truly sad story of how things can go really wrong when you don’t take backups seriously.

It started out pleasantly enough. I was just catching up on John Chow’s trip to China. Now I don’t read John’s blog regularly but I like to scim his RSS feed for interesting headlines. Well I found one today, “Hunting Pandas At The Shanghai Zoo“. Turns out it was just a video of him and his family at the zoo but the real gold was in the link to the “true life account” of how John had a rock fight with Pandas.

That was a funny post to read. I’ll be laughing about that one for a while. What about the backup post you promised? Just hold on, I;m getting there. I promise.

I decided to check out Carl’s blog (the third guy from the Panda story). Alright, here you go. This is the point of my article. the first post I see on Carl’s blog is an explaination that the data recovery company he sent his hard drive (after a server crash) was not successful in recovering any data.

So what is the magnitude of this loss? HUGE! He says he has lost 5 years worth of data for his personal blog as well as 10 years worth of data for his Surreal-News forum. Ouch! Among other data lost was sites of friends and family. That is a tough loss to take.

What can we learn from this? Carl says it himself. “never really intended to run many important sites from my server. I really should have set up RAID regardless.” That’s how it usually goes. You don’t intend to store important data but eventually it creeps onto the server and before you know it you’ve lost important data.

I wish Carl the best of luck in the future and hope he does imlement RAID like he says. You should setup up some nightly backup (at least weekly) software onto a seperate harddrive. Doing a weekly or monthly offsite swap (take a copy off site) is always good when possible.