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All things die Posted by Ari [Email]  (#2847) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Ari) on Wed, 29 Nov 2006 05:45:15
In Reply to: OT Why back-up? (Computer), -993-, Wed, 29 Nov 2006 03:19:03 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
Computers fail. It may not have happened to you yet, but the operative word is YET. And just because something is new doesn't mean it won't fail. A hard drive is a delicate head floating on a layer of air over a disk spinning at 9000 rpm. One piece of dust and it's head crash city.
Your operating system can crash. It's litterally billions of bits of data, and it doesn't take much to go wrong. Software gets corrupted.
I've worked with computers for a few decades, and I can say with authority that they die, break, lock up, sieze, and just plain stop working.
Sure, you only do email and web browsing. I assume you don't have any photos or documents on your computer. Assume that you go to your computer tomorrow morning and due to a disk head crash, all you're looking at is a stuck start-up screen. What have you lost?
You've lost all your Web favorites files. You've lost your email address book. You've lost every email you've ever saved. You've lost every web page you thought was good and saved. Yes, with time and effort you can find most of the web pages, and possibly scrounge up the email addresses. But those emails are lost forever.
When you got your new computer, I assume you migrated software from the old computer. Gee, wasn't that fun? Don't you look forward to doing that again? Oh, you still do have the old computer, don't you? If not, you'll need to set up your new computer from scratch, including fun stuff like your ISP setup and all the hardware drivers. Trust me, you'll spend less time doing back-up than fixing it.
As noted, backing up to the hard drive is not backing up. That's like making a spare key, and then keeping it on the same key ring as the original. You're covered in the rare case that one key stops working, but you're screwed if you lose the key ring, the most likely event. Backing up to an external hard drive is the right approach. Or, you could burn it to DVD.
Once the machine is up and running, you probably want to make an image of the computer, just to make recovery easy. This captures the stuff like ISP settings and that printer software driver you needed to get the darn thing to work. After that, you just need to back up stuff that changes, like your email address book and files, browser preferences, and any documents you may have created. It's easy to set up the computer so that those are located in one set of folders, and then you can back up just that periodically. It'll probably be small enough to burn to CD, if you don't want to invest in an external drive.
Why back up? Because your computer will die. It hasn't happened yet, which means you've been lucky. Luck is good, but relying on it isn't smart. What's the downside of not backing up? Think about how much fun it will be trying to set up the computer again.
posted by 192.249....
, Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:48:44
, Wed, 29 Nov 2006 09:24:18, Wed, 29 Nov 2006 05:45:15 <-- Viewing This Message
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