January 15, 2013

Backing up.

When we first got our own computer, back in....1996? A long time ago. The Huz set me up with Word so I could write a story or a letter or something, and I just took off. I'd learned how to type with ten fingers when I was 12 in summer school in Hong Kong (the HK equivalent of summer camp yao!) - (and btw I'm allowed to make sino jokes cuz I'm one quarter Chinee*) *fact

So there I was, typing away, when suddenly the screen went black. The Huz said that was normal, computers crashed from time to time. I blinked furiously in my attempt to fully grasp that everything I'd typed for the past hour had been lost. Forever. It was... GONE.

What do you mean "gone"? Wasn't there something you could do to prevent this horrifying evaporation of creativity? 

"Well yeah," said The Huz. "You can 'save'."

SAVE?? What is this SAVE???? You didn't tell me about SAVE!?!!

I finally understood that the precious combination of 1's and 0's I'd given birth to were lost forever. I just about had a heart attack.

And so it was that I learned the auto-reflexive art of Ctrl S. I hit that suckah every few letters, or every few seconds, whichever comes first.

Over the years, I've gambled here and there that a hard drive will last a little longer till I back it up. I got screwed only once, about 7 years ago, when one of my drives died with everything on it.  It was 500 gigs of animation and images and I actually genuflected and prayed to every deity I could think of when The Huz sent it away to be drilled down and restored by some Hard Drive Geniuses somewhere. It cost a summer vacation, but it was worth it.

So as I do my latest sporadic backup, I resolve that I should do them more often and maybe so should some of you.




Think of it like fitness. One full back-up per week. Prevent a heart-attack!


7 comments:

  1. I have a 1tb external hard drive that my necessities are on

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    1. Dude I have a triple raid thingie that does it as I work. I back up externally in case of fire, theft, zombie apocalypse. Ya never know right?

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  2. Raving, I have a 1tb to backup the laptops with a 2tb to backup the backup. I had my 1tb fail last week - lost almost everything. Now have a 2tb to backup the replaced 1tb in case it occurs again in the future.

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  3. We have two 1TB external hard drives that we back up to. (Each one mirrors the other.) Ideally, we should move one of the drives to an off-site location (so if our house was robbed or burned down one backup would survive), but we haven't been good with that recently.

    BTW, the main reason why two hard drives? Hard drives can fail and you don't want your backup failing and taking out all of your data. Two hard drives isn't fool-proof, but it adds some redundancy. Given that 1TB drives cost about $90 each, two of them are a good investment to preserve your data.

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  4. Extremely good advice! I need to backup stuff more often. .. it's just so .. time consuming..

    But you're right. I'd rather not have a heart attack...

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  5. You are authentic and humourous. :v never seen a woman with humour and sense together.

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