SaneThinking.com "Protecting yourself from a laptop disaster

Protecting yourself from a laptop disaster - What to backup to.

Always backup to a separate hard drive; no if's, no but's, no P word. Use a second drive. Don't even come near me with that word: "partition"; I have banned it along with the 'F' word on my site.

The days of expensive hard drives is long gone. They used to be so expensive that there were other animals, lesser alternatives, in the same zoo called "Tape backup units". Also banned and banished to some IT museum somewhere.

Save yourself a whole load of confusion and nuisance. It's a second hard drive you have to have and no quibbling. But, before you race out to buy one, hold your horses, we have some more learning before you are ready to dash down to the shops and spend your money.

Now let's get a few other things straight too. You haven't yet bought your second drive but prepare to and start saving. But you can consider this. The drive you buy will be the same size as the one in your laptop or bigger and by bigger I mean much bigger, usually at least twice as big. That's a basic fact and it is the basis for me to rubbish a big assumption that needs to be got out of the way now along with that p word (pa***tion)

What this means is that you don't want to and you don't need to and it is a real pain if you do pick and choose what you backup. One rule from now on for you to stick to: Back It ALL. No if's, no but's.

Clarification:
I say "Back it all" to KISS but behind the scenes and with no messy quibbly option/preferences the detail is tucked away and it is this. My policy is to ignore all .tmp files and possibly one or two other files too. 9999.99% of the time, as 'end user' you don't give a damn, rightly, whether this stuff is backed up or not because it is more trouble than it's worth to even give it a thought. Technically, yes, it's considered and my policy is applied and you get the full benefit of that pre-thinking. This is NOT a loss to you it is a GAIN. This is not heavy handedness but common sense.

This then is the basis for your own backup protection policy so far: Backup everything and back it up to a second hard drive.

If you simply copy that policy for yourself then it will save you confusion, trouble, messing around pointlessly and make life a lot easier.

Just before finishing this article it might be worth adding that at no time will you ever consider either of these two very common backup options: data compression and proprietary backup formats. As far as you and I are now concerned they belong with the P word and the F word, banished forever from my site and from your sight too.

Introducing cloning

Main Contents Page for this series

By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
4 June 2008

You may like to know that there may be other articles, similar to this one, here, in this category:
Laptop Owners

If no earlier date is shown above then this page began life on 08.06.2008. It was most recently updated, improved, tarted-up, sexed-up, modified, polished, or just imperceptably re-edited, due, most likely, to compulsive and unrestrained perfectionism, influenced quite possibly by a minor degree of pedantic extremism, on 30.06.2008.