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.
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Yesterday after checking up on how many books I had read and updating the blog, I was troubled as I was sure I had read/listened to more than this. I then went back and checked and realised that the entry I had put in at the end of last month on the The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, was missing. This failure does raise the wider issue of using The Cloud. Should the user save everything locally first before updating the cloud in case of failure during the updating process. I think this is something I will be doing from now on, as the alternative to check that it is live and online after updating is too time consuming. This is the first failure in six months so it is not that bad a record, but as the saying goes once bitten twice shy.
Sadly this blog system does not allow retrospective entries, so it will have to go in here, as book 11 week 11 (audio book 4). I listened to this from a librevox recording. http://librivox.org/the-three-musketeers-by-alexandre-dumas/ The story brought back fantastic memories of the film I watched as a child and all the wonderful antics D’Artagnan gets up to. Amazingly during the course of the story for the majority of the last sixth of the book Milady de Winter is the real star, as it recounts what happens to her and how she tries to seduce her way out of captivity. A fact I don't remember at all from the film. Really looking forward to further long journeys when we can listen to the next instalment. |
Tim Fuller
Dyslexic doodles on photography, food (growing, cooking & of course eating), faith and other fascinating things. This is a personal blog expressing my views. Archives
November 2015
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