Thursday 29 January 2009

Things semi-related to garments

Today feels just like yesterday work-wise, except that all the things with a deadline that haven't been finished yesterday are one day more urgent today. And since I'm hunting for double files right now (or to be precise, I let a program hunt for them), I can't even do proper work on the computer since all the RAM has been taken already.

And I'm only hunting for the double files to get more space on the external disc so I can do a full back-up before installing updates for two of my programmes. Which I don't really need to do urgently, but wanted to do to have it off my list since I thought it would not take long (and another full backup is never wrong). Speak of efficiency.

No, never mind. Speak of back-ups. I know it hasn't much to do with medieval clothes on the first glance, but when writing my thesis (about archaeological garment finds, which should explain the blog post title), two hard disks died in my computer. Yes, you have read correctly. Two. And the second one was bnly about three months old when it gave up. Since I had one disk dying years before, with less-than-pleasant results, I had grown religious with making backups, so it was not the disaster it might have been - even though the second drive managed to die slowly in such a curious way that it corrupted the most recent backups, costing me about a month of time. Incidentally, I handed in my thesis one month later than I had planned.

With a complete data loss, I would not have finished my thesis by now. In fact, I'm not sure I would have found the heart to do it all over again. Should you be one of those people who are doing it all without a backup copy of your files and a deep belief that you will be the lucky one, please reconsider. Backup media doesn't cost much money nowadays, and it will save you a lot of anxiety and tears (and of course, unnecessary work!) should bad things happen to your hard disk. I'm using a small freeware programme called SyncBack, and I'm content with that, but there are oodles of programmes out there and there's surely the right one for you too, even if you don't like SyncBack.

So please, do yourself and your friends and relations the favor. Do your backups regularly - it doesn't take much time, but boy, can it make a difference!

1 comment:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.