Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

How Cowboy Caleb Saved His Own Life

There are two computers in my home linked by a wi-fi network. One is my laptop, which I pretty much use for everything. And everything these days means surfing the web, updating my blog, using Microsoft Money and surfing the web.

The other computer is my old desktop which I purchased in 2002 as a swinging bachelor to watch movies, download pron, play games etc. Most of my life is currently stored in this computer in the form of disorganized word/excel/powerpoint documents and photos. Which scares me, because this 6 year old computer is now refusing to startup from time to time.

I knew, I had to backup my life somehow. So I went shopping for online options and learnt the economics of online backup - they don’t add up.

What if you upload your life into the servers of a company that will go bust one day - or worse, get bought by Microsoft (waves to Flickr)?

So in the end, I decided to f87kthisshit and just DIY it. I went out and bought a huge 500GB Maxtor One Touch external harddisk drive which cost SGD210.

Then, I went home and copied everything from the old desktop into the new Maxtor drive, which took about 30 minutes.

After that, I set the Maxtor drive to synch with the “My Documents” folder in my laptop. The Maxtor has only one button, which starts the backup process. It’s idiot-proof.

See, I had backup’ed my life in about the space of an afternoon. One doesn’t have to be a genius to do this kinda shite.

In one fell swoop, I have avoided having to manage the transfer process of copying everything to an online storage service, saved money on online fees and mitigated the risk of the online storage company bailing out on me.

Now all I have to do is to remember to buy a new external drive every year to replace the current one because harddisks will fail from time to time. Ho-ho-ho.

Hey dude. RAID the storage device. meaning 1 storage with 2 hard disks insides which is a mirror of the other. when one fails just pluck in a new one and the old stuff will be rebuilt.

Now you need a backup for that backup..
and yes, you should had gotten a RAID storage device. Maxtor has those too

is this an advertisment?

i enjoy reading ur blog or wadever this is cos it never fails to interest/amuse me … and no , i’m not juz talking bout the EDISON saga if that’s what ur thinking .. hope to see more interesting post soon ! =)

hey. thats pretty cheap for 500G. hmmmm… sim lin isit?

*makes mental note to look out for a toaster-like thing in his place, and give it a hard kick*

NICE

The other good one is Lacie I think.

Lacie is an Indian yogurt drink.

Dude…210 for 500g is overpriced. :D

definitely back up that backup.

i did that once on an external hdd ( 4 yrs of memories) and it died on me within mths, i was CRAZY devastated.

I bet the hard disk rpm is only 5400.

backup the backup…

if backup also die how?? infinity loop, man.

I have a one touch too. Very foolproof indeed. But I never got the retrospect software to work. Anyways, it saved my life when my laptop suddenly died for good. Only lost 1 week of data instead of the past 4 years.

If your backup of your backup also dies, then it’s obviously destiny hand that wiped out your data, therefore you are powerless in the face of preordained fate so shut the f87k up.

But what if fate ordained that if you have backed up the backup of the backup, your data would have been saved?

then I would say defying fate comes at a price - SGD210 * 3 to be exact.

Lassie lah diu…