I was chatting with Squib over email the other day, and it dawned on me that there's one very important topic that I've scandalously neglected on this blog:
These days, a lot of the things we care about are stored on a computer's hard-drive (HDD). Unfortunately, many of us don't give enough thought to the fact that HDDs are not magical boxes; they're cheaply made machine parts that come off of assembly-lines in China & Thailand. It doesn't matter if it's a traditional spinning HDD, one of these new fangled SSDs, a USB thumb-drive or an SD card—doesn't matter if you paid $10 or a $1000—at some point they all stop working, and often, they stop working totally, permanently, irretrievably, and completely without warning!
For this reason, it is absolutely vital that if you have anything—ANYTHING—on your computer that you don't want to lose, you need to keep it backed-up to at least one other storage device. Remember, two copies is the absolute theoretical minimum you should have—realistically, you should have a minimum of three.
These days, a 1 terabyte external HDD will set you back about $80AU, and you can usually find 4 terabyte drives for under $200AU. Considering you'll need to allow extra space for files you're likely to amass in the future, and the fact that you should be buying two drives (remember, three copies), keeping your files backed-up at home is not an inexpensive endeavour; however, it is the cheapest solution per terabyte—as well as the only practical solution—if you've got dozens of terabytes of video files … *cough* or something. Of course, having multiple copies on multiple mirrored HDDs isn't going to do much to protect your data if your house burns down. For this reason, it's a good idea to keep additional copies of your stuff on additional HDDs at work, or with friends or relatives. Of course, keeping everything up to date then becomes a giant pain in arse. Also, don't forget to encrypt anything that you absolutely don't want anyone else looking at!
An additional—and I would say complimentary—solution, is cloud storage. There are many providers; simple ones like Google, Microsoft and Dropbox offer a free tier, which is handy if you're one of those people who only has a couple of gigs worth of stuff to back up; others, like Carbonite and Backblaze promise automatic & unlimited back-up of everything on your computer and all external HDDs for a flat fee of around $50US/year. There are, however, a few things to keep in mind if you're going to use one of these services:
- Unless you have a really good connection, uploading terabytes of data is going to take a long—looooong—time.
- You don't know anything about the people in charge, how they're running the business, or what their finances or long term plans are. Yes, they might have a slick looking website, but companies can and do disappear overnight, especially in the tech sector.
- If the company gets into legal trouble—for any reason—including the behaviour of any single customer—it is possible that authorities can seize the servers or close the business down, effectively fucking all customers.
- Companies that hold huge stores of data are prime targets for professional criminals
- Most companies advertise strong encryption, but in reality, unless you really understand cryptography and have access to the source code of the software, you should still encrypt sensitive data yourself on your own machine before letting it go up into the cloud.
I don't want to discourage anyone from using cloud storage; I think it's a fantastic idea—especially for people who want something simple and automatic, have a really good internet connection, or don't have a prohibitively large amount of data to back up. On the other hand, I do want people making informed decisions, especially if they intend to use the cloud as their one and only means of back-up (ie: no external HDD). If this is the case, I implore you to think very carefully about your decision.
Since I tend to live in a text-terminal and stay away from Windows and Mac as much as possible, I can't—off the top of my head—recommend any good tools for managing back-ups to external HDDs that anybody here would realistically use; however, if anyone is interested, I will look into it and do some reviews/tutorials for some of the free/open apps that are available for Windows. Just let me know below.
4 comments :
1. Princess's Mac died Saturday week ago. They tried changing the logic board. Nope. Now they are putting in a new hard drive and she migth lose all her stuff there. She has no back up and we just realised tonight that the podcasts we did are all on there, with all the photo work she did. (I have the original files stored so we haven't lost the audio, but the hours and hours and hours of work compiling the photos.) Yes, she has learned a lesson. Yes, I said 'I told you so...'
2. Mercury has just gone into retrograde and I don't believe any of the woo woo shit apart from MR.
3. I back up everything I do writing wise after virtually each work session, usually to two external hard drives, but sometimes one. It is my greatest n*******e. See, I don't even want to write the word
4. On another topic, I can't fucking wait for the holidays. Have been SOOO busy but good news is we have a new educator so that makes four of us, and hopefully I can offload some of the teaching which would be good. It has gone nuts, two new primary schools rang today.
5. For the holidays we are staying put apart from a quick driving trip to Canberra for my bro's 50th. Mum is coming up with me and P (P will do driving, get her hours up, we are hopeless with it) and we will take two days to meander back the coastish way. I love that drive, the Monaro Highway. I love long drives. If I wasn't a chicken shit I'd drive myself solo around the country.
6. I've been sick for weeks, now on antibiotics. Not walking which I'm missing big time, hope to get back to it on Friday if the weather is good.
That's about all, sorry I hijacked here to report instead of my own blog.
Hope you are all well!
Very sad to hear about P's Mac & all the podcast stuff. If there is a silver lining, maybe it's that it happened now, when she's young, and she'll be prepared for the next time it happens and there is important work/family stuff at stake.
Also sad to hear that you have been sick. I still haven't been properly sick since you put me onto the vitamin D. Having a terrible time with wind at the moment though. Also acne, for some reason. Hormones? Fuck it, I'm blaming hormones.
Happy to hear about the business though. If things keep growing, you'll end up spending all your time doing admin stuff(?)
And feel free to hijack whenever you like. I just like hearing what everyone's doing. … Actually, that gives me a bit of an idea …
So her computer is fixed but everything lost. I left a comment about it on my blog... You're right, it's a good learning thing for her. She's generally pretty on top of things but not this time and she has learned...
My mistake I think - with getting sick - was stopping the vit d completely and not starting before winter... I need to keep going with it until proper summer starts, then stop, then start up again. Maybe. Anyway am going back to the doctor monday for different antibiotics, for sinusitis. Even when i walk my teeth rattle it's horrible.
Glad you have been going well on the vit d. My shoulder started acting up again so I got back on it and it's good now. Amazing, but not enough to kick this thing I've been struggling with.
Sorry to hear about the acne... probably hormones. I feel my skin has been better than when i was a teen/twenties, we all had bad skin, me and my siblings and all went on roaccutane for it, but i've always had a pimple here and there, maybe with months in between but i think my skin is quite oily still, well, oily and dry, but one thing is I don't have lots of wrinkles because of it. I remember my dad saying cleo lane (one of his fave singers) had bad skin when she was young but when she was older, like fifties and sixties, was glad of it because it meant she looked younger and no wrinkles. Mmmm.
I checked out the comment on your blog. Sad about both the HDD & the podcast delay.
I didn't realise you went of "The D" during the summer months. Why is that? I take 2000IU every day, all year round.
Hope the sinuses clear up for your. I've had sinus problems in the past (allergies)—felt like my face was going to explode.
The worst (and perhaps, in a way, best) part of the acne outbreak is that it's been everywhere except the face. Believe me, when you need to spend a day sitting in front of a computer screen, the last thing you need is a big sore lump on one of your arse cheeks.
And speaking of dads and their favourite entertainers, I can't help chuckling whenever I think about my dad saying he thought Mae West was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen, up until he met my mum.
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