serious techie question(s):

[fox]

so two things have happened recently:

1.  a friend of mine lost almost an entire chapter of her dissertation in a freak reverting-overwriting incident.  (fortunately, it was the most recent thing she's been working on and she's been able to reconstruct it, so it hasn't knocked her too far back.)  she has now learned the virtue of Save As rather than simply Save, and is in good enough shape that this comic strip made her laugh rather than cry.

2.  various networking things have changed here, meaning we're all required to go get our computers checked out, registered, examined, and installed with some additional software and whatnot by the end of the month or we won't be able to get online on the college network at all.  my appointment is the day after tomorrow.  this would concern me a lot less if i hadn't heard that the IT guys had managed to -- in another overwriting mishap, but you'd think they'd know better -- completely delete something like three years' worth of one guy's files, in addition of course to all his settings etc.

with these things in mind, i'm about to go out and buy an external hard drive, but i also wonder what everyone thinks about remote backup.  recommendations, etc?  thankee.  :-)

Comments

[kmg-365.livejournal.com]

Unless you're really paranoid about HD failure, I'd recommend a flash drive (provided your PC has USB ports) or physical media like CD, DVD, or ZIP.

If you're really paranoid, you could get a second HD (internal or external), and have it set up so that it is a redundant drive, automatically mirroring any saves or updates. That's a bit overkill, though.

Unless you own a Dell ;)

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Aha! Do you dislike Dells? What makes do you like, then?

[kmg-365.livejournal.com]

We have Dells here at work, and they have a habit of suffering critical disk failures. I like the PC we have at home - it's a Micron. Haven't bought a PC in a few years though.