Friends, as you may be able to guess from the title this is about backups. The other day sadly, my desktop, started emitting clouds of black smoke out of the back, and stopped working. When it had cooled down, and the smoke had stopped coming out I was able to have a closer examination. It seems as if the motherboard has burnt out, as it all looks a bit black. But don't worry everything is all backed up and copied to the cloud isn't it.

I don't know yet if the hard disks have been trashed, I am waiting on delivery of a SATA to usb connector so I can see what is on them. So till then I am reliant on a borrowed laptop and my backup. Arh but what about the cloud. In the last few years I have had four cloud accounts. This is not because I want to but because the cloud service I have signed up to has changed in some way, so I need a new cloud account, and hence I am now on account four. Even that has just notified me that it is changing so I will need to look for another come the new year.

There is one major limiting factor on the cloud – The speed of ones internet connection. If it is not good then this is not an option for large scale backup, but for the small scale – files that are being worked on in the here and now.

So we come back to my backup – I have a couple of external usb disks, that I use, swapping them over as father and son. I normally try and do this at the weekend and midweek. I also use the backup as an undo facility so do not use a complicated all encompassing system, (For our business I use Fbackup 5 which works well) rather I use Karens replicator, with each job coping a folder root. This is relatively quick and easy to do. Having got the files onto the hard disk all it does it update any changes. Roughly every month I do a more major copy to ensure there is not too much rubbish collecting in the backup, as being super cautious I do not use the delete function with the replicator.

So having go a machine and worked out what files I am using I have taken the latest backup and copied that onto a temporary disk, which will now become my live disk (as cant copy the files onto the laptop), and future backups will now run from the temporary disk via the laptop to the backup disk.

So yes it is worth spending a bit on money on a couple of external hard disks, which you can then use as a backup. You should always have two copies of the backup just in case one is damaged in some way and then the backup and all data can be lost.

So now I need to decide do I want a linux or windows machine next, and if the hard disks are not trashed then do I take this opportunity and set them up as a NAS (Network Area Storage). We will have to wait and see.