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For years I wasn't interested in buying a laptop. They were expensive and PCs were, it seemed to me, better. In 2003 I got one because online work I was doing made it advisable to have a back up computer. After a while I realized that the times when I needed to turn on my PC were fewer and further between. Now, five years on, I know from my own experience that I don't actually have a use for a PC at all.
I did add to my laptop however which is what makes this possible because, for example, I don't think this would have happened if I had to used the built in keyboard, so buying a wireless keyboard and mouse combination is the one single thing that flipped the coin so to speak.
Over the years, I have added a few extra add-ons like an external monitor - although for the past year I haven't been able to use it so I have got used again to using the laptop's display which at first seems far too small after being used to a 17" screen was actually perfectly alright once I got used to it again. I also used a pair of RF headphones - again this is perfect and overcomes the need to use the laptops speakers or any speakers for that matter.
Recently I added an external DVD writer - is "external" obvious? Well, I did actually look at internal options, and it was touch and go which option to choose. My choice means I still can play DVDs on my internal player as well as play them (if ever I need to) using the external unit.
These additions mean that there is no reason for me to have a PC at all.
At the time of my changing over, I wasn't too worried about backups because my PC was my main store which I transferred to my laptop and for a long while I used my PC as the backup. But I had to decide a new policy on this. As time went by my laptop was the current state of data validity - meaning that it was my main data store and my PC data was becoming less important so there was a shift in priority of data value from the PC's to the laptop's.
On my PC I had a 2nd 3.5" hard drive and I backed up to that when I was using my PC but now I wasn't using the PC I was failing to backup my data. What should I do?
I bought an external drive enclosure and used that to house my PC's 2nd 3.5" drive. Now I could just use the USB lead to connect that drive to my laptop.
For data backups that served it's purpose however after a couple of years I realized that I really needed to cater for a total failure of my laptop's hard drive, it was after all several years old by now and I knew it was only a matter of time before it would let me down.
Incidentally I should mention that I didn't use a backup program at all for a long time. Never on the PC and only recently on the laptop, so how did I back up? Very inadequately and without a sensible or consistent policy and not very much. Basically, when it occurred to me to do it (nowhere near often enough) I would manually select, drag and drop folders from one drive to the other, a tedious and problematic answer. Something had to be done to improve it.
So I had the two problems to find an answer for, the one being my valuable data and how to back it up more sensibly and the other being how to best cope with a total drive failure.
After some research I knew my best bet was to clone the drive so I looked for cloning programs and advice. What I wanted and what I found didn't come together well enough so I wrote my own little backup program which I have been using since 2006 and then more recently I decided to do the same with the cloning aspect too and since earlier this year 2008 I've been using my own cloner.
The combination is perfect for my needs. Before I created my own solutions for these two tasks I managed to clone my drive using free software but for various reasons which don't much matter, I found them to be unsatisfactory - otherwise I would not have spent time writing my own programs to do it.
There was a point when I took a risk and went out an bought a 2.5" USB external drive and cloned to it and then, holding my breath, took the big step of seeing if it would physically, electrically and datawise swap with my laptop's drive and be accepted by the system. It did and it was.
This would have suited my needs if say, once a year cloning would answer my needs, it doesn't and once a month or once a week does but that often, using the solutions I had discoverd on the internet, was still too much of a nuisance.
That is the story of how I came to produce my own backup and cloning programs.
I share it with you because everyone, just about, who splashes out quite big money to get themselves a laptop really needs to know that the disaster scenario that is hours, days, weeks, months or years away, where they lose their drive or laptop can be overcome and that there is a perfect contingency plan.
I would thoroughly recommend anyone who owns a laptop to spend time considering the options and weighing up what they need to do. It is possible, but very unlikely that they need do nothing at all but it would be very foolish to simply ignore the problem and just hope that disaster never strikes.
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
27 May 2008
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