When the hard drive on our main computer crashed, we realized that it would take many months, if not years, to realize what all we lost. One thing we learned right away, is that the collection of monthly letters that my wife wrote for our preschool coop newsletter were gone. Some inspirational, others informative, and all with her unique sense of humor. Gone.
Though we could probably dig through stacks of old newsletters, and perhaps find one or two, one thing we knew for sure: we didn't want to lose any more. Besides having a better backup strategy, I realized that maybe a blog could help. It would serve two purposes. It would give us a second place to capture the letters for all time, and give my wife a place to jot her thoughts, and tell her stories. She enjoys writing, and maybe this is just the excuse to do a lot more of it.
There is born the "Reflections of a Soccer Mom" blog. There are only two letters there now, but are worth the read if you have a few minutes. I do realize that I have definite bias towards her work, but I think she is a very talented writer. If I can just get her past the "geek-factor" involved with maintaining a blog, I think it just could work.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
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3 comments:
I will check that out. Partly as a a result of your experience, I've been checking into long-term archival backups of data and the news is NOT good.
DVD & CDs are only good for a couple of years, same with mem sticks, zip disks are worthless, various proprietary types may not evolve with the technology. There are devices to store data for longer for archives, but they are very expensive.
In the end, doing frequent backups seems to be the only sure way.
I use a dual hard disk raid system in my PC and I back my data up on DVD. I don't do it very often, but it has saved me much grief. I keep all documents, drawings, music, pictures, etc in a single folder not named My Documents.
Of course, when I have a serious system crash, I have to reload all the software, but reloading the data is simply a matter of copy and past.
Strangely, None of the errors that have occured have been the result of hard disk failure, the raid feature works flwlessly and seemlessly.
There is an online service for backing up data, but that is not very secure, and it costs a monthly fee.
Getting a Raid mother board is as easy as asking for it. For the price of a second hard drive, you will save loads of money on a tape unit or DVD's.
I built my system for about 1100 in 2003. It still kicks ass in terms of performance. Its AMD too.
I used to be really good about backups, but I mostly got lazy because it had never happened to me in my 20+ years of computing. I've thought about RAIDs, but those aren't 100% reliable either. We have a 5 disk raid at work, and the only way we can lose data, is if three drives go down at the same time. This has actually happened at least once, and we had to back to our tape backups! Ouch!
Burn to DVD, CD, save to thumb drives, and even print hard copies. The only real bulletproof strategy, is to employ more than one type of media.
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