Where I’ve Been
One of the best things about RSS feeds is that I often don’t notice if a favorite blogs stops updating for a little bit. When they get around to writing something I’ll see it, otherwise it’s completely out of my mind. Why not subscribe to this blog in order to enjoy the same benefit?
The reason I’ve been gone is that my computer died. During an electrical storm we suffered a short loss of power and when I next sat down at my computer it couldn’t find Windows. After poking around trying to fix it I gave up, copied all my files to a backup drive and started fresh.
I am still recovering a few of my programs but will be back to updating this blog soon. In the meantime let me make a quick pitch for proper backups.
You never know when and how you will lose your computer. It could be a computer issue that takes out your operating system. If you are lucky like me you can copy your files off the disk and reinstall Windows. Or, it could take out the entire disk. If you have a desktop with multiple disks, one which holds a backup, you could lose the entire system in one go. The same goes for USB drives and network storage. Even drives which you leave disconnected can be damaged or destroyed in a flood or fire.
The only proper backup happens regularily, on a schedule, and a copy of the backup is kept somewhere else. Now that I’ve had my wake-up call I’ve installed a program to run daily backups. My plan for offsite is to mirror the backups to a USB drive. I will have multiple and I will swap them weekly, keeping a spare at my work as an offsite backup.
It’s not an good as uploading a copy to a cloud service but considering the amount of data I have to back up it is the most affordable. If my house explodes I will not care that my offsite backup is a week old.
Have you had any data loss disasters you want to share? If so, please leave a comment. You can also find me on Twitter and Google+. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t have to keep checking back for updates.
