Phew!
I didn’t think I’d be with you tonight. I turned on my computer this morning and…nothing. Not even a beep.
Which implied a video card problem. When I got home this evening, I took the lid off and wiggled all the cards and. Yeah. It booted normally. But I don’t like this.
Not least because something similar happened at work last week and we ended up buying a whole ‘nother machine. Fortunately, the techie we got in was able to rescue everything off the hard drive, but it was touch and go for a while. Seems our automatic backup program hasn’t actually run itself for three years and I never checked.
Have I mentioned that I am legally listed as the Information Officer? Yeah, it’s a thing.
Anyway, I suck at backups. Must do better. Good evening!
p.s. illustration not mine. Not to be construed as a book endorsement. Found it on a Google search and liked it.
Posted: September 18th, 2017 under personal.
Comments: 6
Comments
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: September 18, 2017, 11:28 pm
Being a gun nut, I take dead computers out where nobody cares about the noise and work out my tensions and aggressions by blowing the things to bits. Whee! Fun!
Oh, I’m environmentally responsible about it. There’s a back-stop earth berm and I put down a tarp so I can clean up all those bits. And the bytes, too.
Comment from Deborah HH
Time: September 18, 2017, 11:49 pm
My family calls the dead computer a “high-tech boat anchor.”
Comment from Bob
Time: September 19, 2017, 1:09 am
It’s not enough to run backup software. You need to test the restores once in a while. We had an Operating System patch (update) that caused our backup software to stop working. It would run, go through the motions and do nothing of value. Of course, we did not discover that until after the crash that we could not restore from. After that, the official policy was to perform a sample test restore monthly and a full restore to an external disk every 6 months.
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: September 19, 2017, 12:30 pm
Or you could set up a hot backup site, spend a lot of money and time duplicating your environment and then find out you didn’t really backup the data in real time.
Then you could sit in the kitchen and uncle B could sit in the back bedroom and you could invite other people who didn’t know what was going on, have a phone conference and shout at who ever you decided was at fault.
I’ll give you my company number, my experience says it’s sure to be us even though we never touched and weren’t responsible for, your primary or disaster recovery sites, your network, or your back ups.
You don’t even have to have a contract with us!
Comment from peacelovewoodstock
Time: September 19, 2017, 4:14 pm
There are many relatively cheap, reliable cloud backup services now.
Usually about $5 for unlimited storage (per PC).
Bonus is a true cloud backup (as opposed to cloud storage appearing as a local hard drive) provides pretty good immunity from ransomware.
Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: September 19, 2017, 5:02 pm
“No one understands the cloud!!”
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