Back it up

Happy Mom's Day, sorry to hear about your C drive going down, that's a bitch. It must be the time of year for losing hard drives. Ame has a Western Digital that had about 750 gigs of her pictures, art, music, and programs, basically everything she had. It stopped loading the other day, and we are not sure if she will be able to recover that stuff or not. There is a local company in Hayden that says they will try, to recover, but if they can she has to buy another portable to put the data on. I suggested that instead of getting a single terabyte like the last time get a couple that will hold maybe 500 or 750 gigs. One can be her work horse and the other can be just for backup. Now what hard drive should she buy? Who knows which brand is most reliable? We have had a DiskGo Edge, 400 gig, for about 4 years and it has been a total work horse, the whole time. I just fear that it may be one of those deals where you are convinced it is the greatest thing out there then you get a hunk of crap that fails in the first few weeks. Also DiskGo is not very well known, as far as I can tell. I hate to take such chances with the storage device that holds so much. 

Gosh, things were so much easier when I knew absolutely nothing about computers. I went online one day around Christmas, looked at Hard Drives that were external, "Oh, look! This one holds 400 gigs!" Never did any research on it, didn't even know how to. I bought the DiskGo, on Amazon, from an Auto Parts store, somewhere back east. Absolutely no clue what I was going to end up with. Now having been all over inside and outside of our computer, I think I have less confidence that I can get it right than I did back then. 

The only thing that I know for sure is that I gotta' have the stuff backed up, and have most of it done already, but I have so much more to do. A few months ago we caught an extremely vicious malware virus and it, got past two different security programs, and was not detected in the full computer scans. We lost  ability to update the security, and any updates for that matter, [that's where we detected it first] then we could not load personal settings, finally we couldn't even load windows, and I had to hook up an old computer to go online to find the fix. We had to download two other programs [trail versions] to isolate the worm and destroy it. 

After that scare we backed up the C drive on DVD, it took up about 13 discs but worth it to know that we have a second chance if we lose the thing. I will someday get another computer, and I am determined not to repeat the mistakes I made the first two times. I think that the biggest mistake that I made was not knowing what I would be doing with the computer and consequently ended up with much less than I needed. I did it with the first computer when I bought the basic box no guts. Then after finding out that we needed guts to do some of the things that we wanted to do we bought a bigger box and it had some guts, but the guts were incomplete and we soon found that we needed transplants and lots more guts. If I would have learned my lesson the first time I could have saved hundreds of dollars by having ordered the box with all the right guts and not have had to pay more later and install them all myself. On the hand I would not have the hardware knowledge that I have after installing  Sound, TVtuner, Ethernet, and better Graphics cards. I recently had to replace the CPU and while I was in there with the Mother Board all exposed I decide to double the RAM. The fact that I learned how to do that stuff is great and all that but I wonder if I could be happier with all the money that I would have saved by having built the box with all the guts I needed in the first place.

OK,  so,.. two things, the back up thing being one, and the getting the right box with the right guts is of course the other. Oh, and I guess I should throw in there how important it is to do monthly dust removal, if you have as much dust in the place as we do. The worst thing to do to that box full of expensive guts is to let it get clogged with dust and dog fur.  I can only assume that the heat build up from clogged fans shortened the life of the CPU. 

I put all those upgrades and add ons in the box so we could have the means to run certain programs efficiently and do all the stuff we needed to do, but I soon saw what it was really all about. I walked in one night, and saw Ame doing homework, although I had to wonder how much work she was getting done. She had two different instant message conversations going, an online homework aid, she was drawing on her tablet, and she was watching live TV in the lower right hand corner of the monitor.  I had to put my foot down on that crap when she brought home a crappy report card. She was clever though, and tried to get away with a lot of crap by blocking the monitor and doing the stuff she thought she could get away with. One evening while she was supposed to be doing just homework, and nothing else, I happened to see her type " Just a minute, my parents are in the room!" When I finally got to the bottom of it I found out that all the kids were using the same online dictionary that was an instant messaging thing, so they could look like they were doing what they were supposed to be doing all the time talking back and forth to each other. That did not go over too well, and she lost many computer privileges for some time for trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I have since installed a VGA multiplier and a 25 foot cable to the TV so now I can push one button on the remote, while we are watching TV at night and I'm seeing just what she is doing on the computer. She is getting much better grades this year.

Well maybe someone can help me out with a suggestion as to what hard drive to buy. I think that online backup cost too much, and we have bandwidth limits with HughesNet.