Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
If my experience prompts just one person to begin backing up, it will have been worth it.
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I just tell folks "There are two kinds of hard drive users. Those who have
had a hard drive failure, and those who
will. Have you done a backup lately?"
Hard drives contain moving parts. Things with moving parts
break. Corruption that requires reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS and your programs isn't the worst failure, as the drive is still usable.
I helped out a friend a while back who bought a new machine to replace her existing desktop. The desktop was in good working order, but slow. She said "How do I preserve and transfer my data?", and I said "I come over, you feed me, and I pull the drive from your old machine and mount it as a second drive in the new one. Then you transfer stuff across at your leisure."
Well, it didn't quite work that way. I discovered that the old machine, which had been a cast off from an office that upgraded, used SCSI drives, which is not what you normally expect in a desktop. Her old drive could not be mounted in her new machine. Fortunately, the data transfer was easy. Everything she was concerned with was in the My Documents fold, and that could be copied to a flash drive, then copied over to the new machine.
But I don't believe in wasting resources, so the old machine was left in place, and I set up the new machine to be able to connect to the old one over her home network with remote desktop software. The next stop, which remains to be done, is to set up the new machine to back up automatically across the network to the old machine. The old machine may be slow, but it's built like a tank, and unlikely to fail. It can also be the firewall machine and gateway to the outside world, with the router connected to it, and traffic forwarded through it, providing an additional layer of insulation for her work.
And because she can back up to thumb drive and the critical stuff (writing projects in progress) is small enough to fit, she'll have copies on her desktop, old machine, and netbook. Redundancy rules.
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Dennis