Major crash with Docksstar + Sebian Squeeze

[Philippe Amram]

Hello all of you,

last week, I had a very difficult time.
My plug computer (Seagarte Dockstar) crashed for unknown reasons.
Maybe I had a power supply failure, or something else.
Anyway, I had to reconstruct my plug from zero (the Usb sticked has been severely dammaged)

In order to avoid further data loss and reduce the risk of new crash, I have made the following decisions :

• I will find a way to put my archive files in cache instead of writing in the USB stick,
• I will disabble the debug fonction after a few successfull tests (keeps on writing tones of things in the stick),
• I will automaticaly backup my data.
• I have put my plug on a UPS.

When every thing is set, I will let you know how I did it (any suggestion will be very welcome...)

Good luck to all of you !

Cheers
Philippe

[John Canfield]

Hi Philippe,

I made a decision quite a long time ago to use Weather Underground as
my archive (http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/
WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KTXHARPE2) - all I need to do is to keep the
station running and updating and not worry about server backups.

Also, I will *never* ever again use flash memory as mass storage - I
had too many failures. Only a mechanical hard drive or SSD for me.

(We love Paris - been there twice!)

John
weather.janeandjohn.org

On Apr 23, 3:40 pm, Philippe Amram <ph.am...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all of you,
>
> last week, I had a very difficult time.
> My plug computer (Seagarte Dockstar) crashed for unknown reasons.
> Maybe I had a power supply failure, or something else.
> Anyway, I had to reconstruct my plug from zero (the Usb sticked has been
> severely dammaged)
>
> In order to avoid further data loss and reduce the risk of new crash, I
> have made the following decisions :
>

>    - I will find a way to put my archive files in cache instead of writing
>    in the USB stick,
>    - I will disabble the debug fonction after a few successfull tests

>    (keeps on writing tones of things in the stick),

>    - I will automaticaly backup my data.
>    - I have put my plug on a UPS.

[Philippe AMRAM]

Hi John,

thanks a lot for your advice !
I'm going to move the same way very shortly.

In the mean time, I might use a HD instead of a stick.

Cheers from Paris (where it is rainning for the moment...)


Philippe

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[vds]

On Monday, April 23, 2012 4:46:44 PM UTC-7, John Canfield wrote:

Hi Philippe,

I made a decision quite a long time ago to use Weather Underground as
my archive (http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/
WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KTXHARPE2) - all I need to do is to keep the
station running and updating and not worry about server backups.

Also, I will *never* ever again use flash memory as mass storage - I
had too many failures.  Only a mechanical hard drive or SSD for me.

Agree - I toasted a bunch of SD cards and CF and USB disks when running on the Sheeva Plug, so I learned my lesson when I moved to the Dockstar over 16 months ago.  Spinning laptop drive only for me.

I wound up purchasing the real Seagate disk to match the Dockstar because (a) I found some cheap and (b) they look nice.  Obviously any disk works.

Finding a disk that docks into the Dockstar is a little difficult, as its USB connector is in the middle of the short side.  I found some very inexpensive laptop enclosures on eBay for about $ 4.00 each and picked a few up since I have the drives sitting around anyway.

For the disk enclosures, the ones I have were very similar looking to this one, though they were purchased from a seller in Germany and shipped from Hong Kong.  Go figure.  They're "really" thin metal, but they work.

This link is an example of what to look for - the ones I got look like knockoffs of this one:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-2-5-External-SATA-Hard-Drive-Disk-HDD-Enclosure-Case-Box-Laptop-/290615120056?pt=PCC_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item43aa02d0b8


For backups, I use a 8GB USB key docked into the Dockstar.  I write the databases to it 'once' per day, so it will take at least 18 months to fill up if I don't remember to clean it up every six months or so.  I figured writing once was probably safe enough.   I also stash the current day's databases to Dropbox occasionally when I remember, usually once or twice a month....but as John says, Weather Underground is a nice hands-off way too.

[Thomas Keffer]

Some cautions about using WeatherUnderground as a backup:

• The http post to WU doesn't always work. They drop lots of data points (hence, the need for Wunderfixer).
• They don't store everything. Just what's supported by the Ambient protocol.
• It would be extremely tedious to download all your data from WU, day by day (that's the longest fetch they support).
• You would still need to rebuild the SQLITE database from that data.

Personally, I use a crontab to run a daily backup (Simple Backup or Backup-Manager are nice; I think both are available through apt-get). If you're using Ubuntu, you can use Ubuntu One to backup to the cloud.

-tk

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[Philippe AMRAM]

Thom,

I agree with you, I will use a hard drive for the local storage of my Dockstar data
 then back up once a while my database to my "Ubuntu One" cloud.
Wunderweather is more an other way to chek that every thing is ok with my station.

cheers


Philippe

[vds]

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 1:19:17 PM UTC-7, Tom Keffer wrote:

Some cautions about using WeatherUnderground as a backup:

• It would be extremely tedious to download all your data from WU, day by day (that's the longest fetch they support).

Indeed.  Just in case folks who haven't come from the wview side of the world from a number of years ago, I thought I'd mention that a number of years ago I posted a perl script a number of years ago that lets you automate this.   Kind of like wunderfixer, just the other direction.  You can get a day, a month, or a year of your choosing.

See http://www.wviewweather.com/vanilla/index.php?p=/discussion/18/pull-station-data-from-weather-underground/p1 - Looks like Mark Teel put it in the wview howtos after I'd previously uploaded it to the wview google group way back when.

Admittedly once you 'get' your data you'd then have to assemble it and do a database update to load it, which is a bit of a pain in the neck. I used to have other scripts to take care of that, but they're likely long gone.  I just run the backups just-in-case.  If the old data disappeared, I'd somehow survive :-)

FWIW, it wouldn't be too hard to extend the script above with something that generated the right sqlite3 commands from the CSV the perl script above generates from the Weather Underground data.

[Philippe Amram]

Hi everybody,

after this major and (very) frustrating crash, I finaly took the following actions :

1. Moved my /home to a USB hard disk instead of a memory stick,
2. Declared a dayly cron that copies my wwewx directory to my "readynas duo" on my local network,
3. Update a Wunderground site,
   
4. Disabled the syslog in weewx.conf.
   

That's all folks...

Cheers
Philippe