But you know what? After the first couple of days with the knowledge that nothing was going to be done about it for awhile, I slowly adjusted to it and to a slower, quieter time in the past. Before electricity and running water. When we used to go down to the stream and fish away the days, hoping against hope that we'd get a bite. When we used to go down to the park and toss the old baseball around the field. When we used to play something involving a chant of Allee-Allee-Oxen-Free or something like that.
In short, it was ten days of stifling boredom!
But now, I'm back. Mostly. I know the more technically savvy of you, my readers, will be happy to know that I went to the store today and bought an external hard drive that reportedly will hold 500 gigabytes of information and thus back up everything I have written or stored on the various computers I've owned over the last 20 some years and will write or store until the end of time. Better to be safe than sorry. Again. Of course, it's still sitting here in an unopened box but I'll get to it.
I was just wondering one thing as I was driving home and I forgot to ask the young whelp who sold me the thing. What do I do if THAT hard drive crashes?
18 comments:
Ahhhh... so you are addicted to your computer eh? Maybe you should join a 12 step program! Ha!
Dawn, dahling, myself? Addicted? You cahn't be serious!
Um, where do I sign up for one of those programs?
Cat, glad you got it back. Also happy to hear about the backup.
Well, to be completely safe, keep the external hard drive in the box and simply don't open it. Then it will never crash.
Many things in life are simpler than people think they are.
For those of us who are truly anal about backups:
- Setup a raid1 array with internal hard drives. Save all your important docs to these drives.
- Setup a separate drive to which you will install windows. Because windows will eventually fail and need to be re-installed, or need to be upgraded which will also invariably hose it up. Don't save anything important to this drive.
- Once a week/month backup your raid drive to two separate external drives, one which stays on site but disconnected in case of power surges, and a second which you take somewhere off-site in case of destruction of your home.
- Also back up super important files to the cloud, via an online file storage service. This way even if an earth quake destroys all three of your copies, you can download all your important files back from the internets once you are up and running.
Or you can just come to terms with the fact that in the end, very few of the files on your computer make a huge impact on your life, and live with the risk of losing it all. This option will definitely save you some time, as all that pesky backing up stuff is uber consuming on the clock.
Glad to see you back up and running. :)
Steve - Thanks. Now if I can just figure out how to open the box the backup is in! ;->
Colonel - Or not, eh? Why didn't I think of that? Or maybe I have in the past!
Tombo - Holy cow, even I'M not that anal! But I'm leaning toward that final bit of advice.
The theory behind backing up to a separate drive is the probability of both independently failing at the same time is very low. If your backup device fails, get a new one and back up to it since you have your data on your computer.
Dagny - Now there's some advice I can live with! Thank you!!!
Yay! Welcome back. Good to see you. I am shortly going to be the proud owner of an external hard drive too - it seems sensible.
As for Tom ... can you stop him talking in words that make my hair hurt? Please? Didn't understand more than about 10 words of his 'advice'!
x
Kitty - Thanks. And don't worry about Tombo - he's one of those I.T. guys and his best advice is in the second to the last paragraph! :-D
Cat, I do it a simple way. I make a copy of things I don't want to lose (like photos and documents) on DVDs. I use a RW so I can erase or update them. They only hold 4.7 gigs each, but that's alot of space.
Steve in Germany
Now if I only knew what a RW is!
I've been away from mine a little more than lately too. I just felt like I had to break the habit.
Or maybe I just had to prove to myself I could break the habit.
Or maybe I just needed a few more hours in the day.
Oh who am I kidding? My wife made me do it.
Mike - Good to hear from you and remember - Honesty is (not always) the best policy!
That is a lovely photo of you having a meltdown.
Thank yuh, thank yuh ver' much.
I hope my computer never crashes. I have a wonderful friend who deals to the probs I do get, but she spent 3 whole days getting her computer out of the cack!
Meggie, I hope your computer never crashes, too, but having had it happen twice to me, I now have protection. (Never do anything without protection!) I'd recommend your friend get you to a backup drive. It's relatively cheap and can be done automatically.
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