In continuing with my talk on backups I thought I’d list out some common things you should think about backing up.
- Accounting Software
- Quicken
- Quickbooks
- Turbotax
- My Documents Continue Reading →
Some good friends who I had sent off to live in Israel with two laptop computers called me up and told me that one of them had randomly run a system restore.
Don’t ask me how that one happened, but it did. The problem was, the computer had several thousand songs on it that they really didn’t want to lose. Especially since getting replacements for those songs involved a lot of communication with the United States. Since it costs a lot to send packages back and forth, that wasn’t really an acceptable option.
Apparently they had run a “soft” system restore.
Learning the difference between a hard and soft system restore is a good idea. Continue Reading →
Ok, so we saved our data. It is safe now, right? Sure, until one of the following happens:
- Your hard drive crashes.
- Microsoft strikes again (and you have to reformat).
- Another part in your computer breaks and you send it in to be worked on and find that they wiped your hard drive clean when you get it back.
- The Wind Changes Direction (added for dramatic effect.) Continue Reading →
Get In The Mindset That Data Is Not Immortal
The ancient world learned this lesson the hard way when the library of Alexandria burned to the ground taking a millennium of culture and history with it. Information is very fragile. It will be there one moment and gone the next. In fact, just while writing this post I accidentally hit the wrong key combination and lost a small portion of this post!
If Data Is So Frail, What Do You Suggest I Do About It?
There are three key procedures that help to protect you from the beast known as Data Loss.
- Save
- Backup
- Redundancy
I will go over all three of these topics in separate posts. What I would like you to chew on right now is the mortality of your data. Murphy’s law applies to your data all of the time. If something can go wrong with your data, then it will.
This makes for a paranoid life, doesn’t it? Unfortunately this is something of a status quo in computers. The techniques I cover in the following articles will give you a clearer picture of ways you can combat this problem but always remember that your data is mortal and just like any person walking down the street it is prone to being hit by some random bus and being carried off into the afterlife.
God Bless,
-Dan
“Because technology works for you, not the other way around.”