A couple of years ago, an associate of the Ur-Guru’s in Europe bought a 1 Tb Buffalo DriveStation Duo to back up his business data. Last week it stopped working. “I've been using it in a RAID 1 array for the past two years, and it's just failed,” he wrote. “Three different Windows PCs here see it as unallocated space.” Bad news. And while Buffalo offered to replace the hardware, since the … [Read more...]
Is Online Backup Bad for the Environment?
Disclosure: this post contains Amazon affiliate links. I bet you’re smart enough to figure out which ones they are. As we were driving back from Palm Desert to Pasadena earlier this month, the Ur-Guru pointed out a problem with the current craze for cloud computing. No, not the problem I’ve talked about before—slow broadband or no broadband at all making it impractical if not impossible to store … [Read more...]
Quadruple the Backup from Buffalo
Back in 2007, my BFF Jay Pechek sent me a bunch of Maxtor drives. Maxtor’s external hard drives are supposed to have a 5-year warranty, but there’s a little trick with this Free Stuff I get from PR people. When you don’t actually buy something, and don’t have a receipt, you can’t make use of the warranty in the ordinary way. Jay said “I’m your warranty; if anything goes wrong, call me.” Okay, … [Read more...]
The Drawbacks of Dell DataSafe
Yep, this is late again. Sorry. I had a completely insane week last week. Part of the insanity gave me the topic for this week’s Backup Reminder, but I had to sleep for two days before I could write it. I hardly do any computer consulting work anymore, but I have a few legacy clients (not to mention the occasional friend or family member) who can persuade me to wade into the trenches now and … [Read more...]
Test-Driving the (Maxtor OneTouch) Mini: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-19-07
Yes, I'm two days late with this. Friday morning we were in Dunsmuir. It was raining so hard you couldn't even see Mount Shasta, the Ur-Guru was in an evil mood because of the weather, and we were facing a long drive across the mountains to Eureka to meet my long-lost cousin and his family. So I had just about time to back up the computer to my new Maxtor OneTouch Mini drive, and no time to write … [Read more...]