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]

As everyone has already said, it would be someplace other than My Documents. If you want to get really technical, My Documents maps to c:\Documents and Settings\{login id}. Expand that directory and you will see all of the folders that are profile-specific. If you delete a profile, all of these directories (should) go bye-bye. Or if someone saves something to a profile-specific directory when they are logged in, you wouldn't be able to see it unless you were had admin privileges on the box.

Where you put it really doesn't matter. The odds of profile corruption are pretty rare (at least in my experience). And if you had a profile corruption on an office computer, your desktop team should first move the user data files before deleting and recreating the profile. Or, if it's your home computer, log in as Admin, copy the files to a different location, regen the profile, then copy them back.

What you really need to protect against is hard drive failure. Unless you're talking about sector failures, saving to a different location on the same HD wouldn't help.