Meme & a PSA

[revid]

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.

How Massachusetts Are You?

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!

Comments

[indie-wonka.livejournal.com]

Shit, now you've made me all paranoid and since I can't afford an external HD right now, I'm gonna start burning it all on CDs because they're already paid for. Do you have any idea how long this is going to take or how stupid I feel for not having done it sooner?

Thanks for the PSA even though it's making me crazy! :)

[revid.livejournal.com]

How big is your Hard Drive? A standard CD holds about 700 MB of data. I have a lot of video, which takes up huge quantities of disk space, making it impractical to use CDs to back it up.

You can certainly back up your most important stuff with CDs though. A CD will hold about 150 - 200 songs in mp3 format @ 128Kbps (The typical bit rate). One CD will probably hold all your text files. The average photo from a 3 MP camera is about 1 MB, so a CD will hold 600+ photos.

You don't have to back up your operating system or applications, assuming you still have access to the original disks.

[indie-wonka.livejournal.com]

I just realized that I am a total and complete idiot. My iPod is 60GB and nowhere near even 10 gigs of music on it at this point. And I have it set up to use as an external drive. *facepalm* I have less than 10GB of docs, pics, and vids that need to be backed up (and my music collection is already on the iPod, so no need to deal with that). Plus I usually have the iPod with me all the time, so even if my house burned down or got robbed, I'd still have all my data.

The only question is, "Why didn't I think of this months ago?" *headdesk*