How to backup your data and avoid the data loss nightmare
I recently got an email from a friend that had gone through a hard drive crash and lost everything. Luckily, there wasn’t too much there she was upset about but she still wanted to know how to avoid losing information in the future. So I’m going to do a two-part posting on how to back up your data.
You can find a bunch of tutorials to that effect on the web but I’m going to try and make mine very simple.
First you’ll need a hard drive to hold the data. I prefer hard drives to dvd’s or disk media because they can hold more and hard drives are a very good buy right now. Whenever I’m going to buy any technology I usually go to two places. Either Newegg or Tiger Direct. Not only do they have great tech stuff at really good prices, but the commenting system is very valuable. I encourage you to leave a review on a product whenever you can. It makes the community stronger.
For the hard drive, I recommend the Western Digital My Book. That link goes to a 500 gig drive for under $100. You can’t beat that price and that’s a lot of storage. I like the Western Digital stuff the best because they are easy to use. Just plug it into the usb port and it starts right up.
You’ll need to reformat the drive to an NTFS format instead of its default of FAT32. Basically what the difference is that the FAT32 format woun’t let you save a file bigger than 4 gigs to the drive. After the reformat to NTFS though you’ll be golden. Just go to “MY Computer” and right click on the drive. You’ll be presented with a format option. Select that option and choose NTFS.
It’ll take a few minutes but then you’ll be ready to use the software that will save you from the data loss nightmare.
War of 1812 reenactment
at Jefferson Patterson Park. We’d been looking forward to it for a couple weeks and it didn’t disappoint. It was slow to get started but once it got going it was good. The sights and sounds were something. I ended up taking like 300 pictures. I love digital cameras. No changing film. Anthony took a camera and took a bunch of shots. I’ll see if I can get him to post them. Was anybody else there?
Giant Panda at the beach
Not an actual Giant Panda but the Chinese place down at the beach by Rolands. I love that place. My favorite Chinese place in the area. For dinner the other night, we decided to get a crap load of Chinese and feast. I got Dragon and Phoenix. Peg got scallops and snow peas. The boys got combination lo mein and fried dumplings. We also got an order of shrimp foo young and noodle soup so we’d have lunch for tomorrow. If anybody knows a better Chinese place, lets hear about it.
uTorrent
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. People use them to share computer programs, music, photos and video among other things. µTorrent is my favorite free BitTorrent client. The great thing about uTorrent is that it’s designed to use minimal computer resources while offering basically the same functionality as larger BitTorrent clients such as BitComet. The program gets great reviews for its feature set, performance, stability, and support for older hardware and versions of Windows. Its been around since 2005 and is my torrent client of choice. What is BitTorrent?
Proud to be an alum
So I’m an alum of Salisbury University. It’s grown up quite a bit since I went there. The last time I was there I got to see a new building they had just completed. Some fun facts about the innovative TETC Building which houses the Seidel School of Education & Professional Studies and part of the Fulton School of Liberal Arts:
- Some 607,646 pounds of mortar were used, equaling the weight of 40 school buses!
- The building includes some 400 windows
- The 1,550 tons of steel used to construct the TETC weighs about the same as 310 elephants
- Up to 40% of the building’s structural steel is made from recycled materials!
Portfolio
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