I have been among the worst as far as backing up. I have done it sometimes, but not enough to really help. A few months ago I saw this ad for an online backup. It was Mozy. It backsup automatically each night. The best part is that it only cost $5 a month. You don't have to bother with backups ever again and it is cheap, can't beat it.
That would be something to pass along to those with laptops with all their data stored on the HDs there. I just heard from one laptop owner where the laptop simply cooked on him? Since it was still covered under warranty the laptop will be replaced while the data will be lost entirely unless placed in something like an external usb enclosue for backup to another machine before that has to be returned with the unit.
The big lesson there? frequent regular backups by whatever means is available such as external HDs, removable media, and even online storage. For those with Windows Live accounts the option for storage is seen there with the SkyDrive option.
Remember these?
They were more durable than SSD jump drives. How many static discharges have you seen wipe the data from a magnetic disk?
Back in my undergrad days - we had a special 3.5" drive used to recover data from mutilated disks. Every semester during crunch weeks some poor soul wold come in on the brink of tears with a diskette that had been through the depths of Hell. Slap an 'S' on my chest because 9/10 times I was able to recover most, if not all of the documents.
I had somebody come in with their doctoral thesis on an old disk - it got wet.
Slapped it in the old drive - after multiple read fails, chkdsk commands and a pirated version of Norton Utilities; I recovered everything. The whole thing.
Who can say that about a 32GB jump drive that was hit by a static charge?
Or how about when somebody set off a static spark when they plug the drive in - everything plugged into the USB ports are now (potentially) fried - seen it happen.
Sorry I didn't see the 3.5"ers until long after the tape drives, typing programming not clicking on any shortcut to start or load a program, and of course later the eventual 5.25"ers!
Win 3.1 is where I finally had to add in a 5.25" to 3.5" reducer bracket on an old IBM I386 boat anchor just to see 3.1 go on after dos of course! Later files were stored on 3.5"s due to having the 1.44mb capacity over the 1.2mb seen with the larger floppies!
It wasn't until getting past 95 and into 98 the cd writer and later first dvd burner was seen here! Besides MS Dos 6.0 on 3 floppies and 3.1 on a set of 6 I still have a few olden goldies even XP startup floppies still on disk. It wasn't until deciding to dual boot OSs the second drive became a standard item and now look! 5 sata HDs and still not enough room!
I still have an original 8bit dos game I can run on the 64bit 7 even with a little DOSBox help that is!
I don't see what's wrong with using an on-line backup service. It looks like the safest way to go actually. If your house burns down, your backups on external HD's and DVD's won't help you very much.
Hi all.
C'mon guys
Online storage backup is totally impracticable for most HOME users.
1) Upload speeds of typical HOME (not WORK) ISP's are usually pretty abominable.
2) some users CAP bandwidth which renders this stuff totally impracticable.
3) If you take a typical users data these days - especially with Photos, MUSIC (particularly) and other data - maybe video as well this could even run to several hundred GB or even a few TB. (1TB = 1000GB for those not quite sure - and a lot of ISP's cap stuff to around 50 GB a month).
Uploading this stuff via a home ISP would probably take longer than the remaining estimated lifetime of our Sun -- around another 4 billion years. Even downloading on a fast ISP would take a while.
4) You might not be online when you need your data.
5) the Online service might be unavailable or gone bust.
6) Your Bank data has just been sold for 5 USD in a back street bazaar in Bangalore or similar.
With CHEEEEEEEEEEP usb drives just backup stuff at home and have done with it.
For really important data keep another set and store them in another location.
Cheers
jimbo
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