My #1 Piece of Tech Advice and Pictures of My Offspring

Posted on 03.12.08 in Tech Stuff and there are 9 comments.

I just spent an hour helping a client recover email after a hard drive crash. Here is a lesson you can learn.

Buy An External Hard Drive...Now

If the information on your computer is something you would miss if your computer stopped working today, then go - right now - and buy an external hard drive.

I’ll make it easy - here’s one:

"Western Digital 500GB My Book Essential 2.0 - USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U5000N" (Western Digital)

Back up your entire harddrive. Then, if your computer crashes you can simply take your external drive to another computer, plug it in and you’re right where you left off.

If you have a Mac I recommend a program called Super Duper to simplify and speedup the backup process. Could one of you PC folks recommend a backup software for Windows?

Seriously, it is a HASSLE to recover data - sometimes it’s impossible. Go buy a harddrive.

Now.

On A Lighter Note

Here are some pictures of my kids. Enjoy.

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The Comments:

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Wouldn’t backing up the entire HD entail backing up lots of OS and program files that are useless in a restore operation?  I know of some engineering programs that tie the license reg code to the volume # of the primary HD.  Does this really work like a poor man’s RAID?

MB

have this exact hard drive...love it. my last computer crashed and i hadn’t been backing up. talk about a sucky day. i backup every monday now.great advice

Oh, for backup I like SyncBack (for intuitive external HD backup) and Sync2NAS (when backing up to a networked linux based server).  However, I only back up document and settings folders, not the whole shebang.

SyncBack (PC, go to the bottom for freeware)
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

Sync2NAS (not for the faint of heart)
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?6000000036234

They are the most adorable children!! And I’m not at all prejudiced! They’re growing so fast - Grandma loves you guys!! XOXOXOXOXO

Kat,

Great advice.  My Western Digitial 500gig external crashed recently though SO, burn dvd’s too.  I’ve lost two externals now.

My computer repair man actually doesn’t recommend western digitals.  He says they aren’t the best route in the grand scheme of options.  I can’t remember what he recommended now though so a lot of help I am.

Yes Yes back up EVERYTHING TWICE in two seperate places I’m still having computer crash revelations of small things I lost.

can i comment on the boog in smallest’s nose? i am picky like that, ha ha. i tell my children i will pick their nose til they are old enough to do it for themselves.....

i love the picture from behind of the small person!

i did send you an email concerning last week’s spontaneous jaunt north.....did it not arrive in your in box?

MamasBoy,
Yes, it would mean you’d be backing up the OS and all the apps. It does take a lot of time the first go ‘round, but any good backup app will do smart updates thereafter - only updating changed files.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a Windows machine so I’m not sure if you can boot from an external drive, but you can boot from an external hard drive on a Mac (PowerPC Macs require a firewire drive but the Intel Macs can boot from either a firewire drive or a usb drive).

Thanks for the backup software recommendations!

Bush,
Sometimes learning the hard way is the best way to learn. That must have been a bummer, though! That’s great that you run a backup every week. I should probably do that more regularly than I currently do…

Grandma,
They ARE growing so fast, aren’t they? And they are adorable. I’m not biased either…

Charity,
If you remember what that brand was, let us know. I have a portable drive and it’s a Maxtor - I’ve been pretty pleased with it.

I hope your computer problems come to an end very very soon!

Jameejb,
Ha! I saw that and I thought about taking that picture off, but then I thought I’d keep it real.

I think I need to change my email addy here. I currently use a gmail account, but I’m been having a lot of problems with real messages in my spambox. As soon as I saw your comment I checked my spambox and there it was...I’m sad we missed you. So how was the zoo?

Kat - Yes, fantastic advice! If just one person heeds your wisdom, you will have made the world a better place.

Regarding hard drive brands, like Western Digital and Maxtor… I’ve noticed that a lot of people’s opinions on these are extremely anecdotal. If they’ve always had one brand and had good results, they’ll recommend it. If they’ve had one or more drives of a certain brand fail, they’ll decry that brand as pure evil. There is a certain percentage of hard drives from any manufacturer that will inevitably fail prematurely, and from stats I’ve seen, these failure percentages don’t vary widely from brand to brand.

We have had a lot of problems with Maxtors in our server farms lately—worse than I’d expect from “normal failure rates”. It seems like sometimes, a whole batch of drives from a certain manufacturer will be unreliable. I bought two brand new Western Digital drives recently and one failed within a week. (Which was good actually—I bought them from newegg.com, so they shipped me a replacement without any hassle, since it failed within 30 days.)

And I use SyncBack for my Windoze backups, just like MB recommended. Works great.

Last but not least, cute kids! But you already knew that.

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