Slightly Tech-ie Post: Any Recommendations for Online Backup?
Since my old hardrive went bad a few months ago, and I had to deal with a painfully slow home backup system that made it hard to restore my files and impossible to restore programs, I have been looking into better backup solutions. I’m looking at online backup plans like Mozy.com, online hard drive, and others. Anyone have any experience with this?
To make things worse, my new laptop runs Vista Ultimate, which seems to have a bug that does not allow me to run a regular backup to any other computer or thumb drive automatically. Yay for Microsoft (not!) Anybody run into this and have any tips?
Aha! Solved the mystery of my grumpy computer…the hard drive died today and the computer would no longer boot up. I freaked out because I thought the whole of My Documents was lost- along with the 40 page third manuscript I’ve been working on but had no hard copies of – until I remembered I’d backed up two weeks ago. Then I stopped hyperventilating. I took it to a computer repair wizard (or as I call it, the PC Whisperer) and he said, yes, the hard drive is dying, lifted it to his ear and shook it, and got it to boot up one last time so I could copy the files over to a new laptop (goodbye, majority of grant money!) On the plus side, the new laptop is pink and superspeedy. If anyone wants a nice, three-year-old laptop with a dead hard drive, give me a whistle! Selling for cheap….
PS The PC Whisperer says the most common thing for 2-3 year old laptops to go is the hard drive. So remember your backups, all ye who bought laptops in 2004!
On the plus side, my father and brother made it through their respective eye surgeries swimmingly. Hoorah!
And, may tomorrow may be a less stressful day. Health and happiness to all!
PS May go see Hairspray tonight. Need an escape from reality for a bit…
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
