Also I’ve heard from folks in the know that they’ve seen almost as many problems with SSDs as they have with regular hard drives. I had thought about a rugged solid state drive (SSD), but these are incredibly expensive. The first step was to purchase a rugged external drive. My first idea was not particularly elegant, but it was simple (I like simple). Just to remind ourselves, in my case we’re talking about my working data – ongoing projects and “stuff” I like to keep around because it’s useful – so we’re only talking about 1.2 gigabytes (my bulk data is backed up on DVDs and I have copies at work and at home). In addition to backing it up, I also need some way to ensure that everything is synchronized between my home and work computers such that they always have identical copies of my data files. (Actually, my plan is to end up with three displays in my office – I’ll be writing more about this later – so I also purchased an identical refurbished video card from eBay for around $35.) This is refurbished Xeon-based machine with 4GB RAM (a friend has a couple of extra memory sticks that match this machine, so I’m going to boost the memory up to 8GB), a 500GB hard drive, all the usual “stuff” like DVD, Sound, Ethernet, etc., along with a mega-powerful dual DVI video card. For only about $350 I ended up ordering something of a beast, which is winging its way to me as I pen these words. You wouldn’t believe the deals that are out there. Since I won’t be carrying it around with me, the system in my office can be an affordable tower computer. The solution here is to keep my notepad for use at home and while I’m on the road, and to get a second system for use in the office.
For example, suppose I left it in my office overnight and there was a fire (which would also take out my backup drive, now that I come to think about it). One thing I have to do is to protect myself against a catastrophic loss of my main notepad computer. At the end of each day, I took a backup of my working data files (about 1.2 gigabytes) by simply copying them over to the external drive.
Anyway, I’ve explored a variety of solutions and made my decisions, and – on the basis that everyone has their own unique requirements – I think some of the alternatives I considered may be of interest to you.īefore we leap into the fray, let’s remind ourselves as to the way I was doing things, which was to have a 1 terabyte external USB hard drive sitting on my desk. Well, it's good to hear that Carbonite does work. I found Carbonite’s restore process easy to understand and use. Dell supplied me with a replacement hard drive for the XP machine since I had an extended warranty with them, I reloaded XP, downloaded all the updates, transferred all the wife’s files to the new hard drive, and kept the Vista laptop for my business use. I requisitioned my wife’s HP Vista laptop, restored all my files from Carbonite onto her machine, and continued on. Last year my Dell XP laptop with all my business data on it had a hard drive failure. One reader responded to me directly with regard to my mention of Carbonite his response was as follows: In an earlier blog, following my computer crashing, I asked What is the best way to backup and secure the data on my computer? A lot of folks responded and you really should check out the comments associated with that blog.
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