Opera or Firefox?

[Pandamasque]

FYI: Opera has ADblock function built in as well as it can open previously closed tabs (ctrl+z).

[mx_tifoso]

Thanks for bringing up AdBlock for FF! No more adds for me!

[Miguel]

Thanks for bringing up AdBlock for FF! No more adds for me!

If you like F1Technical (let's imagine you were a mod), remember to disable AdBlock here in F1Technical. The ads here aren't very intruse, they often highlight something in Racecar Engineering and, that way, Tomba and Principessa get some money.

[Pandamasque]

S O S PLEASE!!!!!!!!

I've just had 2h with no electricity. When it went off my opera bowser was open. Now I turned my PC back on everything seems to be fine but Opera is as it was in 2008!!!!!!!! Passwords, hundreds of bookmarks, everything is lost!!!

However all the bookmarks, settings and all the history I had in 2008 is there. It's like back to the future. How can that be??? What can I do to get my newer stuff back?? This is literally a tragedy.

[mx_tifoso]

I'm sorry to hear that.

Although something similar happens to me, although at a much smaller level. FF won't 'respond', then I close it down and when I open it back up some of the add-ons won't appear the first time around, but then they will. Hopefully the same can be said for you. Contact Opera asap.

[Miguel]

Pandamasque, before you overwrite anything, if you are on windows try to run chkdsk (the disk error checker). Activate anything to do with finding errors, and then reboot. The error checker should run now (it's a low res blue screen in both XP and Vista).

If you are on linux, you'll have to force an fsck run (it should have happened anyway). Ext3 and 4 are pretty safe nowadays.

[Ray]

Chrome

[Miguel]

Chrome

As much as I like Chrome's responsivenes under Linux and the font rendering under windows (because it seems to ignore many ClearType defaults), I doubt it will help at all with filesystem resillience and integrity.

EDIT: I was probably off-relpy with regards to Ray. Sorry.

[Pandamasque]

I found 1 day old backups for most of the valuable stuff

in case anyone runs into similar trouble, try replacing the files at

C:\Program Files\Opera\Opera\profile (backup first!)

with these

C:\Documents and Settings\=user name=\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile

Most of them have identical names, however bookmarks were stored as opara6.adr instead of the default bookmarks.adr name.

I scanned the system (there were some minor errors apparently), now I'm working on finding the backup for opera preferences and appearance. I also found an ini file with the list of my RSS feeds, not sure if I can integrate it back in, I might need to re-subscribe.

Crucially the bookmarks and wand are restored! [-o<

[Miguel]

OT: Two lessons about hard drives:

1) Make frequent backups. Thus you will be ready when your HD fails. Because it will fail.

2) Only ricers run multiple HD's in RAID 0. Real men use RAID 5. Else you end up having more frequent HD failures. Read performance is identical, write performance is slightly worse in RAID 5, but reliability is soooo much better it isn't even funny.

[Pandamasque]

2) Only ricers run multiple HD's in RAID 0. Real men use RAID 5. Else you end up having more frequent HD failures. Read performance is identical, write performance is slightly worse in RAID 5, but reliability is soooo much better it isn't even funny.

Can you translate that to riser language, please? I have 2 physical HD's (sata 250GB + old ide 80GB) but I have no idea what you are talking about. How do I check what sort of RAID it is running and how to change that?

[Miguel]

2) Only ricers run multiple HD's in RAID 0. Real men use RAID 5. Else you end up having more frequent HD failures. Read performance is identical, write performance is slightly worse in RAID 5, but reliability is soooo much better it isn't even funny.

Can you translate that to riser language, please? I have 2 physical HD's (sata 250GB + old ide 80GB) but I have no idea what you are talking about. How do I check what sort of RAID it is running and how to change that?

I'm 99% sure you don't have RAID. If windows sees both disks as different, you don't have it. Having multiple HDDs is not a sufficient condition to have RAID. The HDDs must be pretty similar, and you need either software support (Linux does, recent Windos do, dunno about OS X) or a hardware RAID controller.

Changing your current set up will involve reformatting both your drives, which is not something you're probably willing to do. You know, buying a new 1Tb drive would be easier and probably cheaper in terms of time invested. Just remember to have applications in the faster drive.

This method sets the disks in an array in such a way that the Operating System thinks there is only one. As you can imagine, there are several possible arrangements. RAID 0 is the one that gives maximum performace, but is very unreliable. RAID 1 is the safest one, but is slower than a single disk. Then you have more complex arrangements that make use of some nice math in order to trade performance and reliability. Simple wikipedia link:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[casper]

You will find the link below some useful information for optimizing your firefox experience, as well as google chrome tips too.

http://www.browserland.com/category/how-to/

[Ciro Pabón]

2) Only ricers run multiple HD's in RAID 0. Real men use RAID 5. Else you end up having more frequent HD failures. Read performance is identical, write performance is slightly worse in RAID 5, but reliability is soooo much better it isn't even funny.

Can you translate that to riser language, please? I have 2 physical HD's (sata 250GB + old ide 80GB) but I have no idea what you are talking about. How do I check what sort of RAID it is running and how to change that?

To add a few things to Miguel answer, in english.

- To get RAID you should:

1. Have identical disks (all of the same capacity).
2. Have a RAID capable disk controller OR get an operating system that is RAID capable, like Linux, Microsoft Server or MacOSX (altough Mac only gives you RAID 0 and 1, I think). All flavors of BSD (Net, Free and Open BSD) and Solaris (Open and 10) also have RAID 5.

In short, unless you're a wizard that spends 3.000 dollars in your PC (yeah, I know YOU don't need that, but I'm mortal) you need a SERVER.

- To get RAID 5 (which I also recommend, as is practically the only way you use RAID with a regular server) you need to have three disks at least.

Of course, it would be frankly stupid (to "pull a FIA") if you get RAID but you don't have a continous electrical source (an UPS).

Me? I use Nero BackItUP and NEVER have lost data in MY LIFE. I still have ALL the data I've produced since 1983 (I still have the Tandy Operating System. Heck, I even have Visicalc! What's Visicalc? What came before Lotus 1-2-3. What's Lotus 1-2-3? Oh, forget it).

[Miguel]

Visicalc. Straight from wikipedia, for Ciro's delight:



I'm such a noob I had to look it up in wikipedia. I had never heard of it.