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Figure I start a Blog here.

I have some Photos posted here and will post more as I go along.

s153.photobucket.com/albums/s210/packin31/

It has been hot here the last few days so it is go out in the garage to do any priming.

Only time I check site is here at work since my home PC hard drive has crashed. Any PC experts out there? I need some advice on how and if I can recover anything off the hard drive. I have tried the recover CD but with no luck. Thanks

Lookin' good Tom!

As for your computer's hard drive, there's experts out there that can recover your files, but expect to pay upwards of $500 or more, if it can even be done.

Eric,

Thanks car is coming along slowly. You know how that goes. I do have a lot of the smaller parts painted and powder coated and ready to go when it is time to reassemble.

Ouch $500 to restore files if they can. One can buy a new PC and some Packard parts for that. My neighbor offered to help me out this weekend with it to see if we can even get it to fire up windows. If not my wife said we will just go out and but a new one. We will see. We didn't have to much saved on it so that is a good thing.

Operating systems and applications can be reloaded, but the data that you create (pix, documents, spreadshhets etc.) are literally irreplaceable - unless you have it all backed up somewhere.

These days, a 1GB flash drive is relatively cheap and quick insurance to backup "valuable" files - before you have a problem.

Meanwhile, here's hoping your friend gets back some, if not all, of the valuable files from your old HDD.

I just hope I had copied over pictures that I have taken of my progress to a CD that the shop that did my metal work created for me.

Thing is we have to flash drives but I have only used them for pictures we download from our camera then we take it to Sams for prints.

O well lessoned learned...

Buy a USB harddrive. You can get a 120 gb drive for under $100 that runs right off the USB power. Ultra portable, and safe insurance. Plus if you ever want to share files with someone else it makes it easy to lugg them around without having to burn CD's or DVD's that are one-time write.

I have the entire website, all my music, all my restoration pictures backed up on one. That way if my laptop fails a 4 foot drop test, all the infomation is stored and ready to use on another PC.

I use a free-ware utility called Sync-Back which I can use to schedule automatic backups of exactly what I want. That way I wont forget to actually back it up.

On top of that I keep an entire backup on my corporate server at work. So if something was to happed to both my laptop and my backup driver. I still have a 2nd "offsite" backup. I know that sounds extreme, but it has saved my bacon more than once.

If you have multiple PC's in your house, then you can buy a NAS drive. NAS stands for Network Addressable Storage. Basically it's a self contained drive that hangs off your wired or wireless home network and all you home PCs can backup to it.

Tom -

Big Kev's points for a backup strategy are all well and good, but I'm not as big a technobug as some people might think. I like to keep it cheap and simple.

I also use a flash drive for transporting files to and from work, stores, etc., but because prices for those devices have fallen so much in recent years, I picked up a second one for use as a file backup device.

Since a lot of my documents are works-in-progress, with many changing on a weekly if not daily basis, they are better-suited for storage on a flash drive, but I also I plan on storing those files on yet another computer (offsite).

The static pix, as well as all the stuff I have scanned and will be scanning for the site this winter will need to be archived to CDs.

Yet, we digress. Please continue to tell us more about the progress with yer '31 - the oldest Packard in this site's Owner Registry (as of this writing).

Thanks for all the advice on my PC problems. I will look into it.

I just finished talking to a Hardware guy here at work and guess what there is/was a virus in the suburbs around here about the same time my PC started to act up. The virus is called disc clean or something like that. I have anti-virus program but he told me by the time they came up with a fix a lot of PCs had already been infected by it. Well guess mine was one of them. Urggggg


Yes I will keep you all informed on my '31 progess.


Take care

The best, safest thing you can do is what I did:

apple.com/macbookpro/

It's well worth the money.

Update on my PC. Had to get a new hard drive. New one is 160GB. But I have learned my lesson I will save important data to a CD or Thumb Drive.

Thanks all for you help and input on this. Now back to my restoration blog.