revid | Meme & a PSA

I did this one solely because I want Marisa to do it, OK?

You Are 36% Massachusetts

You could pass for being from Massachusetts - until you open your mouth and start pronouncing R's.

I scored as well(ha!) as I did only because my father is from Massachusetts, and I have cousins there and in New Hampshire.

It's time for one of my periodic reminders to Back Up Your Computer!

Raise your hand if you or someone you know has lost everything in a hard drive failure. That's what I thought. Imagine losing your whole music library, all your pictures, all your Green Day videos, all your school papers, all those priceless IM convos you've saved. Even if you only do a back-up once a month or so, think how relieved you'll be that everything didn't go bye-bye.

Here's what you do. Buy an external hard drive that is the size of your internal drive plus any other other attatched external drive. For example, I have a 160 GB internal drive, plus a 60 GB external drive (called Green Day heeheehee), so I purchased a 250 GB external hard drive to back them both up.

For Mac users:

I recommend Neptune Firewire Drives. They are very reasonably priced and Firewire is much faster than using USB. I use a freeware program from LaCie called SilverKeeper which is easy to use. The Neptune hard drive comes with a free program called Retrospect Express, which is more complicated, but more powerful if you have more advanced back-up requirements.

For PC users:

Virtually any USB external hard drive will do. For example, Staples (shout out to Tas) has this 250GD hard drive on sale for $80 after rebate. That's a steal. (It cost me almost $500 to recover my data when my HD croaked several years ago.) There are numerous freeware programs to use, such as this one, or this, although I can't vouch for them since I haven't used them.

Maybe this sounds like paranoia, but I actually keep my backup drives in my car. After all, what if my house burns down? :-) But seriously, is your data worth $100+ and an hour of your time every month? Sure it is!