Monday, May 09, 2016

Last night’s misadventures on the internet….

Not really on the internet, but on my computer nonetheless. Every once in a while, I’ll do a back-up of my key files on to my usb hard drive. And last night was back-up day. It took me over 12 hours. Though, to be honest, most of it was the Steam program compressing all my downloaded games. I’ve been on Steam for 4 months, and I apparently already have over 350 gB worth of stuff. Then there was the 216 gB Windows XP virtual machine. And then I backed up my document, downloads, and the like. My backup drive has a 2 tB capacity, and while I’m not filling it up completely yet, I can use plenty of it quite easily.

I also have a second back-up. My windows installers are on usb flash drives, and there’s enough room on them that I can also store current copies of essential utilities and device drivers. Those were updated as well.

Only problem with doing this is that I’m too tempted to wipe my computer and ‘experiment’. Then again, I’m going to be hating it if I have a hardware failure, and I don’t have a recent back-up (like my most recent one). But I figure, if I’m going to ‘experiment’ then it’s going to happen. That’s how I became so good at computers. Just keep trying. And back everything up.

One other thing with my backup drive: Unless I’m backing up stuff, or restoring stuff, it stays off. Suppose I get a virus, and I lose the entire contents of my internal hard drive. I can still wipe it and start over, but if you have a corrupted archive, you’re going to be back to square one. A hard drive that is not on at all can’t be infected…

No comments: