[or-roots] ain't puters wunnerful

[Leslie Chapman]

Marilyn;

I had a discussion with our favorite computer salesman on the subject; One
of the advantages of the My Book is portability, that is if you are away
from home you can take your computer stuff with you. Unfortunately that also
gives you greater opportunity to lose everything. On the other hand it is
also a way to save things in the event of a disaster like fire. He has all
his accounts on a drive at home and work all the time.

One advantage of backing up to an online service is that it avoids the
disaster at home problem. It is as slow as your internet connection though
and that can be a bit of a hassle. I have historically been lucky to manage
to transfer most of my data from one computer to the next when I had a
computer meltdown and mostly relied on what I had shared with family to
"back me up" Unfortuntately this time it was the drive that went bad and I
had qute a bit of precious stuff that wasn't backed up anywhere. The
genealogy mostly just means time lost, though I am sure a lot of what I had
accomplished I'll probably not manage to recover, but the photos and video
of family are a big loss.

I guess my only recommendation is to consider what you really don't want to
lose; pictures and video could be converted to DVD and saved, but
unfortunately my understanding is that even that medium is transitory, I
hear things like ten years at most. So we face a never ending task of
recopying important stuff, or saying goodbye to it??

Genealogy info can be saved as hardcopy; but that has quite a cost and in
the event of major disaster would be a lot harder to move/save.

What I am looking at is redundant hard drives; I think I will probably end
up installing two 500 gb drives on my computer and my 250 gb external. I
will use one on board disk for regular activity and the other one as a
"ghost" or mirror of the first.  Of course there is always the chance of
losing both drives at once, but that is a rare event. Then when I wan to
travel I put what I want along on the external. It will be more of a hassle
and expensive, but I sure don't want to go through this again.

I guess the big question is "How much computer stuff do you have you can't
afford to lose?" When I started playing with PC's my hard drive was 200 mb
uncompressed and I thought it would be a long time before I needed more
space. Then my son started playing games on CD. Now my nephew has a flash
drive that has ten times as much storage and cost me 1/50 th of what my
first PC cost!  And it won't store a tenth of my photos that I still have,
or even all of my genealogy as of Dec 2005 which is one stage of my backed
up stuff.

Ironically one of the things I lost was the photos of the Crescent City
Cemetery; now they are available online. So my sugestion would be DVD of the
images if that is practical, and make a copy to share with family and make
sure they understand you expect them to keep it in good shape in case you
need to get a copy of it back!

If you have a LOT of "finished product" genealogy (like that's ever gonna
happen) I would suggest putting that on CD or DVD as appropriate and I
really think the only safe way is redundant drives, but again that doesn't
protect against fire or floode etc.

The big problems I see are time and money.  I had never recovered completely
from the previous two computer disasters because I was restructuring my
genealogy and wanted to get that done (like that's ever gonna happen) before
I worried about backing it up big time. WRONG.

My problem is focus; if you can do so I would suggest focusing on the
important stuff first.

 I hope some of this rambling will give you some worthwhile ideas.

Les

-----Original Message-----
From: or-roots-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us
[mailto:or-roots-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us]On Behalf Of Marilyn
Schwartz
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 6:25 AM
To: 'or-roots mail list'
Subject: Re: [or-roots] ain't puters wunnerful


Thanks for the warning on the "My Book" thing!  I just bought one, thinking
IT was the way to save all of my photos, out of danger of computer crash,
etc.  So how do you back it up?  Do you still have to keep all your photos
on your computer?  I thought the idea was to be able to keep all those
megabytes OUT OF the computer and make space.  Do I need to subscribe to
Carbonite.com or one of those back-up pay sites?

Marilyn S.