Sorry...

Posted By: cmerin on

Thursday, April 17th, 2008, 3:45 pm

As any geek knows – whether chic or otherwise – with owning a computer comes great trust.  Trust that your hard drive won’t die and leave you without your precious memories or important papers.

But this said trust can only last for so long.  At some point you’ll hear a faint hum, feel an extra hard vibration, see the light flicker a little bit longer.  What does this mean?  It means you better get that hiney in gear and make sure your stuff is backed up!

Online storages offer many different plans to suit your needs.  One of the main advantages I like about using an online storage company is that I don’t have to worry about losing a drive to a fire.  Currently I am using Carbonite.  For $50 a year you can back up your hard drive, in it’s entirety.  No size limits.  It’s all done automatically or manually, if you prefer.  There are other options.  XDrive offers 5GB free or you have the option of upgrading to 50GB for $10mo/$100yr.  Allmydata offers unlimited storage for $4.99 a month.  The only downside to online storage is the possibility that the company goes out of business.  Another point to remember is that you will undoubtedly need a fast connection to do the backups.

If you want something right there, in your face, there are a multitude of external hard drives available.  Whether you want a stationary desktop model or a portable one, there are ones to meet everyones needs.

Currently at the top of my geekwishlist is the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1terabyte.  They, of course, have other options available.  Their passport portable drives are geekishy chic in 11 luscious colors *no purple*cough*.  Seagate also offers an excellent external hard drive, the Free Agent.  But with all things geek – make sure you do your homework and decide which works best for you.

What do you guys use to backup?  How often do you backup?

Tags: geek is chic, backup, hard drive, computer

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Posted By: mellers on

Thursday, December 13th, 2007, 6:45 pm

Partner runs his own small business fixing computers. From time to time, he has to "re-build" someone's computer from scratch, which involves him backing up all their data on to another hard drive, before he "wipes" the customer's machine and starts from scratch with it again.

Now, I KNOW I am an anxious sort, but one of my worst nightmare's is that he won't do the backup properly and when it comes to reinstating the data, won't be able to re-instate it. Sadly in that instance there is NOTHING anyone can do, as the formatting of the customer's hard-drive, means all data on it would be lost. SO far, it HASN'T happened, in the 5 years he has been trading - UNTIL LAST NIGHT.

My worst nightmare came true and when he came to restore the data from back up it wasn't there. ALL this person's important documents pictures and vital files which should have been visible on our back up hard drive GONE.

The absolute worst part of this was that it was a new friend who had trusted partner to do the job properly. Needless to say, neither of us slept last night, and I have been so sick with worry about it today that I haven't got up out of bed (except to go to the loo) all day let alone, got dressed or got out of the house. I have been so ill with a headache and nausea with this that I haven't eaten or drunk anything all day nor been able to post on my boards (which I otherwise do at least 5-10 post every day) - it's THAT important to me.

We don't have many friends. I don't have any best friends and just 2 girly acquaintances that I could chat to, say once every 3 or 4 months or so. Partner has only one friend and we have no friends as a couple - EXCEPT this new couple that we have become friendly with through partner's job.

Of course, losing all his files would put the kybosh on this burgeoning friendship and the thought of people thinking of us as careless people who could destroy someone's import stuff, was just too awful to bear. Although partner had done the backup himself, I had been helping with the rebuild and installation of the new motherboard and memory, and felt tarred with the same brush.

Anyway, I have barely felt like I had the strength to sit up, let alone get out of bed today and felt so ill with worry as to what this new friend would say, that the day has passed in a blur of anxiety and throwing up. But partner came home at about 7 pm and finally told me he had found the files.

Apparently he hadn't been looking for them in the right place and fortunately , our friend was able to tell him where they were (on the backup drive) straight away. I have never been SOooooo relieved in my entire life.

I have subsequently been able to eat something, and feel like I might actually be able to sleep a bit tonight, as soon as I am actually able to wind down. Strangely enough I though writing it down would help me purge the fear and anxiety that this has brought me, but bizarrely it is just bringing it all back. I still have the headache and paracetamol AND ibuprofen haven't shifted it.

I know this isn't on a par with the sort of problems I see here on iVillage where lives are at stake, but it certainly felt that my future as a ompetent human being, who was able to keep a friend was on the line.

If there are any gentle hugs out there, from someone who isn't thinking I just need to pull myself together, I'd love to know about them....

Tags: nightmare, backup

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