Last Nights Show - Big thanks Bob

[cgrafx]

My band has been using SAC for 3-4 years now without issue. We had our first system failure last night.

We played our 1st gig of 2014 last night in Half Moon Bay.

Its been a couple of months since our last gig and I made the mistake of not checking our SAC rig prior to our show last night.

We arrived early... as I always like to do, especially for new venues.

Its about 5:30PM, we have most of the gear in the venue so I fire up the the console and it takes an unusually long time. Its normally less than 30 sec from power-on to desktop.

I realize I'm staring at a windows 7 login screen, meaning the system is booting off the backup partition on the audio storage drive instead of my SSD.

Ok.. so I reboot and try again. still won't boot of the SSD.

Multiple attempts to reboot. Nothing. The drive is not showing up as connected. Ok, pull covers and check cables, SATA connectors, Power Connectors, SATA Slot, Still Nothing.

The SSD is dead.

Its now about 6:00PM.

Ok, I'm pretty sure I set up a backup XP partition on the audio drive for just this sort of problem.

I can't find a 2nd XP partition.

I figure Ok, I did a bunch of testing on the Win7 setup originally, I'll just use that.

Reboot into win7. The login screen comes up asking for my password. I type my normal password... it won't let me in.

I try another password, nothing. I keep trying anything I can think of for the password. Still nothing.

BIG NOTE: the keyboard was powering up with the numlock key turned on. The numlock light apparently is not working. The system was not taking my password, because half of my keystrokes were numbers instead of alphabets.

Our bass player suggests the numlock key might be on.

So.. the Win7 login screen has an option to use a virtual onscreen keyboard. I try this and am able to get past the login screen. (My normal password was correct)

Ok... now I just need to load SAC and run some configurations.

where is SAC... damn. No folder, its a bare win7 installation.

Its about 6:30PM by now. We are supposed to be starting at 7:00 PM

At this point, we have let the venue know that we have a serious problem and may not be able to play.

I'm still thinking if I can get a copy of SAC I have a working computer I just need the software.

I just don't have anyway of getting a copy of SAC.

We start asking around of anybody has access to a computer with internet access.

On of our friends who has come to see us play has a laptop back in his hotel room. Great.

There is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

We are going to have him get a copy of SAC onto a thumb drive and bring it to me.

Its gonna take about 15 minutes to get a copy of SAC back to me. In the mean time, we continue setting up our gear.

I finally get a copy of SAC, it takes about 20 secs to install the program. I click the icon, it fires right up.

Ok... we are in business. lets get the audio assignments, go to the ASIO drivers..oops... damn.. I don't have the RME drivers loaded.

OK... our friend heads back to his hotel to grab his laptop, I should of just had him bring it to begin with.

While he's gone, I do a quick board setup. I have all of my ADAT configuration info labeled on stickers on our system rack.

This was done, just so I don't have to remember what's connected where. The system is preconfigured for a stereo 2-way FOH, 8 mono and 4 stereo monitor mixes. I'm too old to try and remember what is connected where.



Having this info at my finger tips, made it possible to do some quick pre-configuration of the board.

Its about 7:40PM by now.

Our friend gets back with his laptop and I download the RME RayDAT drivers.

I load the drivers, reboot the system, turn off the Numlock on the keyboard so I can log in.

THIS IS WHERE THE BIG THANKS GOES TO BOB

It took me approximately 15 minutes, to configure the RME driver(set at 64 buffers), assign the SAC ASIO driver (All the Input/output assignments are run on their default 1-to-1 mapping), assign the FOH and 5 Monitor mix outputs, throw up a mix for the FOH and set 5 Monitor Mixes.

This would not have been possible if SAC was not such an elegantly designed piece of software.

Granted I was working on pre-configured hardware, but the fact that I could load SAC and the RME drivers and simply have it work saved our butts.

We started our show at 8:00PM

The venue was happy, the customers were happy. Lots of people dancing from the minute we started playing.

Thanks Bob!!!

[mojogil]

One of the things I like about SAC is that it is very easy to travel with redundancy. I never show up without at least two computers that can run the show, a thumbdrive with backup files, and an extra bank of preamp. I had a similar situation where a drive went bad. I just pulled out my laptop, which was set up properly for SAC, and loaded the most recent show file. Done. No sweat involved.

[RBIngraham]

Just a suggestion,but if you use a remote, I always install both the remote and host version of SAC on every machine I might use. That way, I always have the SAC host right there and ready to go. If the remote isn't set up to run the host at least I can always copy the install folder and move it to another machine.

I also rarely leave the house without my netbook which I have a prepaid USB broadband dongle for. So it will cost me money, but I cab get internet access almost anywhere, and get to my dropbox and/or other cloud storage, where I keep most of the drivers I need, etc...

Just a suggestion for the future.

[cgrafx]

Things learned last night.

1. Always bring my SAC Remote netbook along (this way I have internet and file transfer access)
2. Always travel with a USB stick
3. Have a separate backup drive available. (I already carry a backup power supply)

I actually did have a backup boot drive in the system (although it was not fully configured). I thought I had actually setup a cloned XP partition, but it appears I must have done that in a different time-line.

I'm already researching options for a drive cage for swappable SSDs. Once our setup is configured again, I'll clone a back-up drive that will live in the support box with our backup power supply. I may toss in some RAM sticks as well.

I'm hesitant to build an entire second system, as its a lot of extra weight, space and expense just for emergencies, but if our show dates get busier I may make that investment.

Since I have the case pulled apart, this also gives me an opportunity to bolt down the CPU heat sink, as it currently is just the stock press clip style.

[kylesoundman]

I had almost this exact scenario happen to me. Only I didn’t have time to fix it so I ended up mixing the show on a backup Mackie board I have been meaning to take out of my trailer so I don’t have to keep moving it around. In my case it saved the show completely. My problem ended up being a corrupted windows dll file. I was able to recover everything that was on the drive and then I installed a new SSD. I left the old hard drive I recovered in the chassis so if it happens again I can simply hook up the sata cable and power to it and be up and running and only have to rebuild a mix. Eventually I will put a new second SSD in it in the same configuration as a back up. Plus carry all the other backup things as suggested. Live and learn is the old saying goes.

[Donnie Frank]

SSD's scare me. Though reliability has greatly improved in the newer generation SSD's, I have had a lot of SSD failures in previous years. So when I decided to go with an SSD for my SAC rig, I made a conscious decision to run 2 SSD's. I don't mirror them because Trim doesn't support RAID volumes, so I just back the first drive to the second drive after every show (paranoid I may miss a file or folder so I just copy the entire drive over to the other drive - takes like 8 minutes). I copy Mix files to the spinning drive, which also has an image of the primary SSD.

After copying SSD #1 to SSD #2, I rename #2 "Backup." It is second in line for bootup. So if the primary SSD fails, it immediately goes to the second SSD. If I see the C:\ drive named "Backup" I know that the primary drive has failed.

I have simulated failure by simply unplugging the SATA cable. It works flawlessly.

I'm seriously thinking of just setting up a Mirror RAID to avoid doing backups. I honestly don't write enough to the SSD to worry about degrading performance (read: Trim support). All my recorded audio goes to the spinning drive.

Both my SSD's are Intel X25 drives, which have failed me before.

I thought of just going to a spinner for my SAC drive, but I really like the lightning quick bootup. And when people are waiting for music, seconds really do count.

[cgrafx]

you don't actually need to backup after every show.

Once you have a working configuration, you only need a single snapshot of that configuration. Basically the boot disk with optimized OS and any software that you are using. Plug-ins, drivers, SAC/SAW etc.

Our configuration only rarely changes. So I would only need to make a disk image after a configuration change.

Configuration does not include SAC or SAW show files, only things like driver updates, plug-ins or other working software.

Everything else are show files. Those are very easy to backup to a flash drive or spinner if you have it installed.

I'd actually recommend against raid mirroring. Raid mirrors are not a backup. They guard against hard failure only. They will very happily duplicate soft errors, erased files or any corruption that might occur.

Its much safer to have an offline backup of the system drive than an online raid mirror.