OK, nobody in the family is hurt. Just the electronics — the main family computer. The hard drive just went and decided to freeze up. It’s not recoverable at the local shop and is going to have to go out for full-blown disaster recovery (cost still pending, depending on what they have to do and if it is even salvageable). Yup, tons of family files on there that we really do not want to lose. This is why there weren’t any updates over the weekend.
Lesson learned — schedule your backups. Speaking of which, if you’re tech savvy and already doing this, what is your approach? Online backup service? Second hard drive? DVD? What program(s) are you running to coordinate it? All suggestions appreciated, because I won’t be making this expensive mistake again. (And the drive was only 2 years old and gave no signs of being ready to fail, such as the clicking it ultimately showed.)
On a happier note, you can view this amazing video about Christian the lion. It breaks through my sour mood about the computer.
I use the data distribution method. All data from all computers gets duplicated on other computers in the house. In addition I have a Western Digital MyBook 500 gig external drive that I put stuff on. And speaking of that drive, I think I only have another 50 Gig or so available, so I'm probably going to have to purchase another one soon. External drives are fairly cheap these days though and there's no reason not to have one since they will spare you pain in long run.
James,
What software (if any) do you use to automate the data backup? And is it incremental, or just a big dump each time? Just curious.
Sorry, didn't see the response until now.
Unfortunately it's all a manual process at the moment. The computers are networked, and I have my pictures and stuff sorted by month. So once every couple months or so I just push all the data from one place to another. Not using any software per se, and I only push the newer stuff. There's very little else I care much about other than the pictures at this point (it's not like I'm writing a bunch of word documents, and any code I work on usually gets pushed around via email, so there's always a copy of that somewhere).