It’s always nice to get questions from readers. For one thing, it makes writing this newsletter go much faster.Loyal Reader and Mac user Mike Van Horn wrote in response to last week’s article on restoring data with an example and a question:We use Silver Keeper as our backup program. It does incremental backups and makes straightforward copies of the files. We use a couple of pocket-sized Hitachi … [Read more...]

Last week a Loyal Reader asked if I could write something about restoring data from backups. This is about as important a topic as you could find, since backups won’t do you any good if you can’t restore from them.“Restore,” in this case, means “getting your data back.” It’s one of the more logical bits of jargon in the computer industry, since the technological meaning is pretty close to the … [Read more...]

That’s not really a hard drive inside your computer. It’s a time bomb. And if it’s more than three years old, it’s ticking pretty loudly. And if it’s giving you scan errors, its chances of survival have just plunged.Drive failure is something most computer users experience sooner or later. All hard drives fail eventually. In some cases, however, another component fails first, leaving you with a … [Read more...]

Last week’s backup reminder prompted some reader responses, which I thought I’d share with you this week.The first was from Loyal Reader Mike Van Horn:Great philosophical discussion! What medium do you use to record information to last for what period of time?Day, week, month, year10 years,1001,00010,0001 million yearsWe send data etched on gold plates along with a space ship that is headed on a … [Read more...]

Happy New Year!Rather than talk about New Year’s Resolutions, which always seem made to be broken, or at best to be temporary, I want to talk about preserving the past for the future.I suppose you could say that it was seeing the search report that said someone had tried to find references to an “eternal network drive” on the Backup Blog that got me onto this subject. (And no, I haven’t forgotten … [Read more...]