Back That Thang Up

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who . . . wait, scratch that.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who back up and those who will. I am sad to say that I had to learn the hard way. Several years ago my new laptop, only a few months old, had to have it’s hard drive reformatted. I think it was some goofy program that I downloaded from the internet. Luckily I had not had the computer very long and still had a lot of files on my old computer. But boy, did I learn.

I know that you can purchase software for backing up your files; for a long time I used Backup, software that comes when you purchase a .Mac account. But now Apple’s OS 10.5 comes with Time Machine, and this thing is amazing. It makes backups of my computer every hour to an external hard drive.

Of course, just as internal hard drives will fail (not if – when), so do external hard drives. Chances are they will not fail at the same time, but . . . I also want to put my files on DVDs. Two sets of DVDs: master and disaster, as my brother would call it. One set stored at my home, the other set stored someplace else and hopefully safe from any disasters that may strike my place of residence.

Backing up of computer files is important for everyone, and especially important for people with photos and other irreplaceable files. Don’t learn the hard way!