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I'm in the middle of a little crisis with, still don't know if I will be able to recover years of coding in Multicharts, Excel, etc. That bring me to ask, do you have a working strategy to enable you to recover rapidly?
I taught i had one with an external in line hard disk backup.... wrong.
Last Thursday nigh, out of sudden, PC start to malfunctioning. Mouse, not responding, but charts and other tools where still updating. Ah, only a mouse problem....
No it was not a mouse problem, it was the start of an escalating chain of problem. After having work around the PC, I decided to bring it to the doctor. I'm not a complete idiot in the PC, but not an expert at all. The technician confirmed that it was a Windows problem and hard disk will have to be erase and Windows re-install. No problem, I said, I got back up...... I taught I had....
Soon, I realized that to rebuilt a machine, you need an image. My back up was made of data files only. No software, no licence etc. Multicharts files where not saved. For the moment, all my written study's , signal, indicator are considered loss. Years of work maybe gone.
I still got a little chance to recover using an un erase software call "RECUVA". Luckily, after having paid and received my PC, I decided to buy a SSD hard drive. My ex hard drive had been reformatted, but only the OS as been re-install. Maybe, I will be able to recover my data. If not them, I will have to restart all the work or change for a different approach to trading. I can't just imagine to restart to code all the work to manage data between Multichart, Excel Excel to IB, Truly special indicator, etc. Years of work. I'm a patient guy, but I need to be realistic. I don't remember exactly how I coded everything. Specially, the channel of communication between Excel and Multichart was a piece of art to me ( I'm not a coder)
Still 3 hour to go for the recovery software. If this is not working, I will look for a specialize company to look for my missing data
PC is a nice tool, very powerful. We adjust it, put fancy thing, add some tool, select favorite Internet site. WE bought software, licence, we install password and cookies. We use some software to clean, maintain etc.
You just realized all you have done and work once all your familiar PC is gone
Do you have a backup strategy?
Did you tested it?
How if any part of your PC went out of work?
How if a major electricity failure cause an extended out of electricity period
How if your data get corrupted?
How about a malicious virus?
How
How
How
There so many thing to thing on what may go wrong. These question need to be address if I and you want to survive to a desaster
I still don't know how I will organize a pre-disaster strategy. That will be my main job for the next week
Thank to read me. Hope I help some of you to start a mental reflection on how to organize and create a working and effective rule and tool to recover for any disaster.
Martin
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I copy all data files to a USB drive. In the event of a disaster, I can re-install NT and other programs and then copy the data files over.
One thing I did run into; when I would buy software online and download it. Some companies have a time limit on how long the download will be available. I keep a file of all downloaded software licenses that I copy to the USB drive and I order the software on a CD/DVD if it is available even though I download it and there is an additional cost.
I have a laptop that I only use for trading. I do not surf the web with it or download anything not business oriented. I constantly have it monitored for virus, malware etc.
I have never had a catastrophic calamity since I went to this methodology.
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
First, I use Parallels on a mac to run TradeStation in a virtual WindowsXP environment. I do have virus protection on XP, but it's minimal since I do not run anything in that environment other than TradeStation. I use the mac for web surfing since it is less prone to viruses. No, I don't surf the web while trading. This is just the setup.
Second, I use DropBox to back up TradeStation every week (Friday afternoons). This takes 3 minutes from the TradeStation menu, then another 5 minutes to sync to the cloud (the target folder for the backup is in my DropBox folder). I tell TradeStation to back up everything.
Third, I have a laptop I use as backup for TradeStation in case things go wrong with main computer. I keep this setup in sync with my main trading platform every week. After I turn on the laptop, it syncs with DropBox and I just start TradeStation and do a restore. Yes, I have to keep the TradeStation version in sync as well, but I download the updates from within TradeStation. If something does go wrong with my mac and I'm trading off my laptop, then I will be looking to fix or replace it.
DropBox is a nice convenience, but you can do the same use a usb thumb drive, but don't lose it! Having a virtual machine is nice as well, since it separates my trading environment from my play environment. However, it is probably not the best solution if you run cpu intensive indicators/strategies (which I don't) or use many charts (I have about 6 going at any given time).
I used to have a NAS for backups, but it had a hard drive failure and I never replaced it.
Hope this helps,
-C
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu