I asked one of my readers what I should write about today, and she suggested a reminder about why it is we need to make backups. As it happens, I collected a number of statistics for my presentation to the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology last week, so I have them handy—and they are indeed sobering.Every 15 seconds, another hard drive crashes. And when I say "crash," here, I don’t … [Read more...]

For ten days every year, three thousand teenagers from around the country descend on downtown San Jose for the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology, where they get to visit high-tech companies and universities, hear keynote speeches from industry leaders, and “work to develop solutions to real-world dilemmas.” (I asked whether any of the solutions they came up with were ever applied; … [Read more...]

Searchstorage.com, sister website to Storage Magazine, has put together a Learning Guide on backup and recovery. Visit the site and go to Backup School, taught by Corian Douglas, author of the impressively readable (and impressively long) Backup Book. The classes are a combination of 15-minute webcasts and downloadable worksheets, with HTML course outlines. Once you finish the introductory course, … [Read more...]

One reason people put off making backups is that they take time—time during which you can’t use the computer. With the USB 1.1 connection between my current laptop and my external hard drive, a complete Ghost backup of my half-full 20 GB hard drive takes about 90 minutes. Even with the FireWire connection from my late computer it took 45 minutes. It should hardly surprise anyone if, rather than … [Read more...]

It’s time for another terminology lesson. If you know all this, you can skip reading the article and go straight to backing up your computer(s). On the other hand, you might prefer to keep reading just to see if I make any mistakes. A backup is something you have in case something goes wrong. That means you have to have it where you can get to it quickly, because a backup is no good if you can’t … [Read more...]