EcoblogIT

Lost in Transition?

Reading about Mike's problems with hard drives and data loss in "To Computing Heroes" made me think about happened to my own home PC last year. I leave my PC on pretty much 24/7 at home, but last year we went to Florida for 2 weeks and so I switched it off while we were away. When we got back, I switched it back on again so I could upload the photos that we had taken, but when it started up I got the dreaded "Non system disk in drive C:" message. The system disk was completely dead. I had to go out and buy a new disk and do a fresh install. The only backup I had was on my second hard drive which I had taken by copying our My Documents' folders onto it, about 3 months earlier. I lost quite a few documents, and (more importantly) my wife lost 3 months progress in The Sims !

After that I went out and bought a external firewire hard drive, the Maxtor One Touch, and I now regularly use the Backup tool built in Windows XP to back up my entire PC onto it. I had already been using Windows Backup at work to back up my laptop onto spare space on my desk PC's C: drive (I'm paranoid about losing stuff now), but when I tried to use it at home I couldn't find it on the Accessories menu.

It turns out that it is installed as part of XP Professional, but it is just left in a folder on the install CD of XP Home, so you have to manually install it if you want to use it. It's a really easy to use tool and it's fast as well (it uses Volume Shadow Copy if you're interested in that kind of stuff) - I fully recommend it.
Here's a good introduction which also explains how to install it for XP Home.

Interview with Jimmy Wales

Mark Hurst of Good Experience has a brief interview with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipeadia on his blog.