Today's Internet Threat Level: GREEN
Handler on Duty: Daniel Wesemann
Handler on Duty: Daniel Wesemann
At first, when a pal of mine called to rant about the new tendency of his OS to go "hasta la Vista", I laughed. He is an IT professional, and a little swine flu in his computer is no big deal. Or so I thought. What started as an occasional hiccup on Thursday apparently turned into an unspectacular but complete Exitus on Friday: The computer simply didn't boot no more.
Of course we all know, often from individual experience, that a disk drive with a "mean time between failure" (MTBF) of indicated 500'000 hours is NEVER the one drive that we bought. Rather, we usually seem to get the "mean failure" version, whereas other people must be getting the "time between".
Nevertheless, this apparently hasn't taught us to be diligent with our backups. As far as backups of data on personal PCs go, most people are either in the "ignorant and negligent" or "knowing and diligent" camps. The special corner of data loss hell, the "knowing but negligent" section, seems to be solely populated by IT and technology people.
It doesn't have to be you. Go buy that USB or eSATA drive, and get that copy made TODAY.
The sad irony is that a more recent backup was available, but it was on an external drive that I had chosen to "repurpose" just last week...and had done a full zero-byte-overwrite-erase to be 'secure'. ACK!
Needless to say, a few people are pissed of at ME for not having copies of their documents...despite everyone having their own flash drive for important stuff ... Time to get a regular "when the power is on files are being copied somewhere else" backup in place for the rebuilt laptop!