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Nerdling

backup

Hey, lady, what’re you doing Friday night?

Backing up, of course!

I’m really awful at backups, but my computer refused to boot three times this morning and I think I need to face the fact it’s probably on its way out. No complaints, it’s nearly eight years old, but it took Windows 10 pretty hard.

I always buy as much computer as I can possibly afford, so this one’s going to hurt. Just hang on until after Christmas please, honey.

Good weekend, folx!

Comments


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: December 8, 2017, 9:40 pm

Good luck with that, seriously.

It’s just so damned hard to let them go ain’t it?


Comment from bikeboy
Time: December 8, 2017, 10:46 pm

I remember the first PC I bought. I think it was over $2000… I sprang extra ($200 or so) for the cavernous 20-megabyte hard drive. (Standard was 10, to go along with the 5 1/4 floppy.) And it had EGA graphics – 16 colors all at once, and at 640×480 resolution! Sweeeet!

At least Moore’s Law still seems to be valid – you’ll get lots more bang for your Pound Sterling, than you did 8 years ago. Upgrading to a new machine is a pain… but the pain is largely offset by bigger, shinier, faster, etc.

(If I had it to do over again, I’d shoot every digital photo at the maximum resolution. At one point, I “economized” to save memory-card and disk space, but those issues are just relics of the past, mostly.)


Comment from Ric Fan
Time: December 8, 2017, 10:48 pm

I skipped Win 10 bc I knew there wd be problems. My laptop is 6 -7 years old and on it’s way out, too. I bought another laptop 5 years ago which crashed after 1 year never to get running again bc I never backup. Yeah, I dumb like that.


Comment from Fritzworth
Time: December 9, 2017, 12:49 am

Was just on the phone with my son a little while ago. He joined a tech company as head of sys admin a few months ago. He was telling me that a few weeks ago, he discovered that the company’s main database (200GB, 15 years of data) hadn’t been backed up in three months. Turns out the prior sys admin had a fairly dumb (in all senses) backup process where the DB was backed up weekly to a 3 TB cloud storage VM. It had run out of room and stopped backing up. Wasn’t alerting anyone. He said he almost ran though the building to the CIO’s office when he discovered this. Quickly implemented a vastly expanded backup process, with multiple progressive backups during the day and a full backup each night.


Comment from Bob
Time: December 9, 2017, 4:30 am

Windows 8 was such a disaster that my wife insisted I erase her computer and give her something else. I installed Ubuntu for her and she’s never looked back. Amazingly, photo import was a breeze.

I use a Mac, and I want to convert entirely to Chrome (Chrome don’t need no stinkin’ backups) but there are progams and devices that I still need to use that don’t run on Chrome (yet).
That’s a long way of saying that “there ain’t no Windows 10 around here, and there ain’t gonna be.”


Comment from gebrauchshund
Time: December 9, 2017, 4:50 am

Backing up is for cowards.

What is life without risk?


Comment from technochitlin
Time: December 9, 2017, 1:31 pm

I was able to build an insane rig for less than $900- 32Gb RAM, 3Tb storage, top line Intel 4-core processor, hotshot video card, fancy case… runs games, Photoshop, and pretty much anything else in a flawless Win10 environment. Don’t let the nay-sayers get you down. I’m willing to help if help’s wanted.

Just sayin’…


Comment from BJM
Time: December 10, 2017, 4:11 am

@Fritzworth 15 years of data in one archive….that’s asking for a massive failure.

A company I worked for ran a real-time, complex accounting system written for their industry. One afternoon a week before the firm’s annual K was due they ran the quarterly routines and discovered an entry error. Time to call for the backup. Bingo! Corrupted archive. No one in IT checked the logs for data integrity for several years. The acctg dept worked day & night to re-enter two quarters of data and filed on time but had they not managed, it would have cost the company millions in share value. Backup issues are probably more common than anyone can imagine.


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: December 10, 2017, 2:49 pm

We, on the other hand run daily backups on a system that the manufacturer no longer supports, for data that hasn’t changed in years, other than some daily useless test runs,

because….

Ah, give me a moment and I’ll come up with some suitably polite comments that aren’t at all sincere.


Comment from OldFert
Time: December 10, 2017, 4:10 pm

Backups.

I worked at a U.S. Army hospital in the IT department. While our electronic med records were well taken care of (control and funding were top-down from the Pentagon level), the daily Office Admin was not, and was generally neglected, especially backing up user data files. The recently-hired network branch boss finally got the CIO and command group to fund a pretty good backup system. From what I could tell there were many, many plethora of terabytes of space on the system.
Then the network branch chief who designed and implemented it left and none of the remaining network guys knew how to maintain it (or even use it for that matter). The old guy had tried to show and tell, but they didn’t pay attention (dunning-kruger effect incarnate).
And the leftover “engineers” (I use the word sneeringly) wouldn’t even put in for formal training to learn how to use it. Even better, they also didn’t bother to request funding for vendor support for the system.
I ran into some of the folks from the old shop (I’m retired, thank goodness) and they told me that the hospital had recently sprung for an office admin backup system. From what I could tell, the hospital hadn’t even used up the system capacity they already had, but they didn’t know how to allocate it and so they just went and bought a new one. I doubt they even took out the old one since no one was sure what physical equipment comprised the system, and which pieces-parts were something else (including little “private” projects that weren’t documented).

Yankee tax dollars at work.


Comment from Deborah HH
Time: December 11, 2017, 11:20 am

Gah! How I hate Windows 10. Husband runs Chrome on his old Asus Ultrabook and is happy, happy. I trust Google even less than I trust Microsoft, but there you are.

For Uncle Badger and all of you:
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/12/06/long-haul/


Comment from Sigivald
Time: December 11, 2017, 10:20 pm

Notes for the future: The rated working life of a normal hard drive is five years.

You dodged a bullet by being lucky enough to be able to back up data after the first flakiness started.

Backup Truths:
1) Untested backups aren’t backups.
2) On-site backups might not be backups (if you need Serious Data Protection).
3) RAID is not a backup.
4) Disk drives are so cheap (even in Britain), that there’s no good excuse, if you care about your data.
5) Automated backups are the best backups, because automated backups actually get done.
6) Windows’ built-in system is a lot better than nothing, for local backups; if you use it, make sure you’re telling it to grab your files, because it tries to be “smart”, and computers are bad at that.

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